Found in knee replacements and bone plates, aircraft components, and catalytic converters, the exceptionally strong metals known as multiple principal element alloys (MPEA) are about to get even stronger through to artificial intelligence.

Sanket Deshmukh, associate professor in chemical engineering, and his team have designed a new MPEA with superior mechanical properties using a data-driven framework that leverages the supercomputing power of explainable artificial intelligence (AI). Their findings, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, were recently published in Nature’s npj Computational Materials.

A research team has unveiled a breakthrough in improving the performance of zinc-air batteries (ZABs), which are an important energy storage technology. This breakthrough involves a new catalyst that significantly boosts the efficiency of the oxygen reduction reaction (ORR), a crucial process in ZABs. The development could lead to more efficient, long-lasting batteries for practical applications.

Lund University in Sweden has been awarded an EU grant of 8.3 million euros for a new international doctoral programme in regenerative medicine and advanced therapy medicinal products. The aim is to improve the environment for regenerative medicine and ATMPs in Europe and facilitate cooperation between research and clinical application.

A research team consisting of Kazumasa Uehara, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Toyohashi University of Technology, and Yuya Fukuda, a pre-doctoral candidate in the same department, demonstrated that scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) power modulation of 4–8 Hz theta oscillation, known as frontal midline theta (FMT), observed in the medial frontal cortex just before initiating a movement is likely a key neural indicator explaining individual differences in the speed of motor skill acquisition. Analysis of scalp EEG data during a motor learning task integrating vision and motor action revealed that subjects who learned more quickly exhibited higher FMT power just before movement onset. These findings would contribute to the future development of personalized learning support and training methods based on EEG. Such methods could be applied in physical education fields such as rehabilitation and sports training, which require motor learning, as well as in enhancing musical instrument performance skills. The results of this research were published online in Experimental Brain Research on May 15, 2025.

How do plants regulate these two pathways? Recently, a review article published by Professor Lin Zhang’s team at China Agricultural University pointed out that plants balance carbon expenditure with phosphorus acquisition efficiency. When soil phosphorus is scarce, plants increase investment in their root systems, allocating more carbon resources to the roots to search for limited phosphorus through the direct pathway. Conversely, when soil phosphorus is relatively abundant, plants reduce carbon allocation to the mycorrhizal symbiotic system.

In Project Chimera, Graz University of Technology's Game Lab Graz combines a VR computer game with educational problems in order to convey scientific content in a motivating way.

Scientists have found that when tomato plants are infected with the late blight pathogen, neighboring healthy plants connected via the arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) network can activate the defense genes related to jasmonic acid (JA) and salicylic acid (SA) within 24 hours, and this process is completely dependent on the direct connection of the hyphae.