Lung cancer remains the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, accounting for nearly one in five cancer deaths – around 1.8 million lives lost each year. One of the main reasons is late diagnosis: in its early stages, the disease appears as extremely small nodules that are difficult to distinguish from healthy tissue, even for experienced radiologists. Researchers are now exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) could help solve this challenge by giving doctors a more reliable way to analyse complex medical images.

Finding the amount of storm-washed sediment entering Brush Creek, a tributary of Beaver Lake in northwest Arkansas, was one of the goals of a recent study, “Watershed-scale controls outweigh local crossing effects on sediment loss from unpaved roads,” published in the Journal of Environmental Quality. Data did not cleanly support the hypothesis that direct crossings would be a major driver of downstream sediment yields. The bigger story, the lead researcher said, turned out to be what is happening across the whole watershed.

As humanity's exploration of the Earth's internal structure deepens, Earth's free oscillations, serving as crucial "fingerprints" for revealing the large-scale structure and dynamic processes within the Earth, have always been a core subject in geophysics. Ground-based station observations are currently the mainstream method for measuring Earth's free oscillations. With the advancement of space technology, high-precision inter-satellite distance measurement holds the potential to become a novel method for detecting these oscillations.

In a recent paper published in Space: Science & Technology, a research team from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Sun Yat-sen University, in collaboration with the TianQin Research Center for Gravitational Physics, proposed a novel detection and analysis method for Earth's free oscillations utilizing the "TianQin" space-borne gravitational wave detector. The study constructed a theoretical response model for Earth's free oscillations within the TianQin detector and derived their analytical waveform for high-orbit satellite laser interferometric measurements. Through numerical simulation and Bayesian parameter estimation, the research team demonstrated that for a major seismic event like the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, TianQin could achieve a clear detection with a signal-to-noise ratio as high as 73 and independently distinguish at least nine different free oscillation modes.

Researchers from the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Harbin Institute of Technology, led by Professor Jiao's team, report a photoelectrochemical photodetector that integrates α-Ga₂O₃ nanorod arrays with CdS quantum dots. By exploiting the pyro-phototronic effect, the device operates at zero-bias, and exhibits a broadband spectral response from 220 to 700 nm with responsivities of 0.99 mA W⁻¹ at 254 nm and 1.48 mA W⁻¹ at 450 nm. The rise and fall times are 30 ms and 24 ms, respectively. Furthermore, the detector executes “AND”, “OR”, and “NOT” logic functions and successfully transmits the optical message “HIT”. These results provide a route toward broadband, fast-response, and low-power optoelectronic modules for optical communication and sensing.

A newly developed bioinformatics tool, MPGK, integrates Mendelian randomization, polygenic risk score, Gene Ontology, and the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway analyses into a unified command-line workflow. Designed to reduce the learning curve for beginners, MPGK automates complex post-genome-wide association study analyses while maintaining reproducibility and flexibility. Validation using publicly available datasets demonstrated its ability to identify disease associations and biological pathways consistent with prior research.