A study led by researchers from the Department of Microbiology at the University of Malaga has revealed how organic farming –the one that uses natural substances and processes, avoiding the use of synthetic chemicals– can, in the long term, help crops become more resistant to drought in a natural way.

The advancement of electronic skins toward commercialization calls for cost-effective and robust flexible conductors, among which metal films are attractive candidates but suffer from poor stretchability. Conventionally, cracks formed in strained metal films are universally considered detrimental and sought to be suppressed. Herein, we demonstrate that cracking is not a drawback, but rather an effective design parameter for on-demand tailoring of film properties. By exploiting the size effect in crack engineering, we propose a bioinspired, dual-scale architecture that endows metal film conductors with up to 325% stretchability. We show that through the synergy of nanoscale pore implantation and microscale substrate roughening, progressively evolved crack patterns can be programmed within metal films by modulating structural parameters. This tunable film cracking behavior yields a nearly 25-fold regulation of stretchability, representing a remarkably wide tunable range among previously deposited metal counterparts. Leveraging these advances, a stretchable metal film-based, AI-empowered electronic skin is constructed, demonstrating excellent practicality across diverse flexible sensing scenarios. Our strategy highlights the pivotal role of the size effect in precise crack manipulation, and the multi-scale regulation paradigm establishes a fresh route to performance improvement of flexible conductors.

Technology that converts carbon dioxide (CO₂) into fuels and plastic feedstocks using electricity is gaining attention as a core technology in the era of carbon neutrality. In particular, ethylene and ethanol are high-value materials widely used in the production of plastics, fuels, and chemical products, but until now, the only metal that has effectively produced them has essentially been copper (Cu). Through this study, Korean researchers have revealed the limitations of existing catalyst theories that have explained this principle.

A team from Graz University of Technology has developed a prefabricated brick wall that can be dismantled and re-used without being destroyed. This reduces emissions significantly and conserves valuable resources.

Hair, nails, and horns, all made up of keratin, are some of the hardest and most resilient structures in animals. Inside zebrafish cells, keratin plays a distinct role, giving them the strength they need to move together as a coherent tissue while modulating the driving forces behind their movement during early development. But what happens when keratin is missing? A new study from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA), published in Nature Communications, reveals how crucial this protein is for life itself.

Since their discovery in the 1950s, metallocenes — chemical compounds where a metal atom sits ‘sandwiched’ between two carbon rings — have been at the heart of organometallic chemistry research, finding applications in catalysis, materials design, energy, sensing, drug delivery and more. Yet knowledge of their formation has been limited, due to the transient nature of their unstable intermediates.

Published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have reported the first full structural characterization of a doubly ring-slipped reaction intermediate in the formation of a metallocene. With its unusual structure, the characterization provides new evidence of how metallocenes may form, break and react, presenting design opportunities for stimuli-responsive, metallocene-based materials for a wide variety of potential applications.

The groups led by Prof. Dawei Zhao from Shenyang University of Chemical Technology, Prof. Haipeng Yu from Northeast Forestry University, and Prof. Lisha Sun from Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University developed an innovative strategy. They introduced thermally stimulated polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules to optimize the supramolecular assembly of cellulose and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). This approach successfully mediated the reconstruction of a denser and more resilient supramolecular network, resulting in a novel cellulose-based supramolecular plastic, termed Cel-T plastic.