The booming electric vehicle industry is approaching a wave of spent lithium-ion batteries. Recovering critical metals—lithium, cobalt, and nickel—from battery cathodes efficiently and sustainably has become a critical issue for both resource security and environmental protection.

In a review article published in Materials Reports: Solidwaste and Ecomaterials, researchers at North China University of Science and Technology innovatively combine bibliometric analysis with technical assessment to map the full technological chain for cathode resource recovery. Their analysis reveals that while hydrometallurgy remains the dominant approach, it suffers from high energy consumption and secondary pollution. The authors argue that future technologies should prioritize green, low-carbon processes, intelligent sorting, and system integration to achieve a truly closed-loop recycling system.

Understanding the formation and evolution of double Schottky barriers during sintering is essential for controlling the electrical performance of ZnO varistor ceramics. Here, in-situ high-temperature dielectric spectroscopy is used to continuously track this process. Negative permittivity caused by electron plasma oscillations is observed above 700°C. Densification and grain growth occur mainly during heating and soaking, whereas barrier formation is concentrated at 800-650℃ during cooling and is further regulated by Bi-rich phase transitions at 650-500℃. These findings establish a direct link between sintering, microstructural evolution, and electrical functionalization in ZnO varistor ceramics.

High-performance structural ceramics are critical materials for extreme-service applications. Recently, high-entropy carbide ceramics have attracted great attention due to their exceptional hardness, wear resistance, and high-temperature stability, although their intrinsic brittleness still limits further applications. Among the various strategies available, the synergistic regulation of spinodal decomposition and precipitation has emerged as a promising approach to overcoming the hardness-toughness trade-off, enabling (Ti, Zr, V, Nb, Mo)C high-entropy carbide to achieve simultaneous increases of 36% in hardness and 45% in fracture toughness, respectively. This strategy provides a new route toward the design of damage-tolerant advanced ceramics with superior mechanical performance.

High-entropy design is widely used to tailor structural disorder and local polarization in ferroelectric ceramics, but whether it necessarily enhances relaxor characteristics in tetragonal tungsten bronze (TTB) systems remains unclear. Here, entropy-tunable K(NaPr)_1-x(SrBa)_xNb₅O₁₅ ceramics were constructed to decouple the factors governing diffuse phase transition and relaxor-ferroelectric evolution. Contrary to conventional expectations, increasing configurational entropy does not enhance relaxor behavior; instead, the system evolves from an ergodic relaxor state toward a ferroelectric-like state. This evolution is governed by crystal structure, BO₆ local environment, and polar nanoregions dynamics, whereas diffuse phase transition is associated with incommensurate modulation.

The journal Materials Reports: Solidwaste and Ecomaterials (MRSE) is welcoming submissions at this time. MRSE has a mission of communicating innovative and original research, interesting and critical thinking, development, and application of various solid wastes around the world. The editorial team will consider original research, reviews, progress reports, and communications that have the concept of turning solid wastes into unhazardous, useful, functional, and valuable ecomaterials. 

Engineers at the China Ship Scientific Research Center have developed an autoregressive deep-learning framework (VMD-BiGRU-QRNN) that predicts complex dynamic midship bending moments in severe ocean waves. Tested against physical tow-tank data from a 205,000 DWT bulk carrier, the system reached an average R² of 0.9533 and accurately captured high-frequency whipping peaks, providing crucial risk-assessment data to prevent structural catastrophic failures.

A field-based study from the Yunkai Mountains reveals divergent elevational diversity responses between overstory tree and understory plant communities, highlighting the necessity of integrating vertical stratification and full elevational gradients for tropical mountain biodiversity conservation.

Instead of being discarded after seawater desalination, concentrated brine can gain a second life as a chemical feedstock. Researchers have developed a solar-driven offshore continuous-flow platform that couples freshwater production with selective methane conversion by directly reusing desalination brine as the chlorine source. The integrated system simultaneously produces freshwater and chloromethane, offering a strategy for the in situ utilization of offshore natural gas resources and introducing a new approach to solar-driven offshore chemical manufacturing.

Recently, researchers from the Department of Neurosurgery and Neurosurgery Research Laboratory at West China Hospital of Sichuan University published a comprehensive review article in the Chinese Medical Journal focusing on the regulation and targeted therapy of the tumor immune and non-immune microenvironment. The review provides a complex scope of a new hotspot in glioma research and treatment: the glioma microenvironment and its targeted therapies.Recently, researchers from the Department of Neurosurgery and Neurosurgery Research Laboratory at West China Hospital of Sichuan University published a comprehensive review article in the Chinese Medical Journal focusing on the regulation and targeted therapy of the tumor immune and non-immune microenvironment. The review provides a complex scope of a new hotspot in glioma research and treatment: the glioma microenvironment and its targeted therapies.