A global survey of 44,711 endangered Puya raimondii plants reveals topography and poor seed dispersal will erase nearly all habitat by 2100 under +5°C warming, requiring assisted colonization.

Vitamin K has long been linked to bone health, but its precise role remained unclear. A new study shows that vitamin K-dependent γ-carboxylation in osteoblasts regulates bone breakdown through the signaling protein, GAS6. In male mice, blocking this pathway increased bone mass by reducing osteoclast formation, while elevated GAS6 enhanced bone resorption. The findings uncover a previously unknown communication pathway between osteoblasts and osteoclasts, offering insights into osteoporosis and future skeletal therapies.

Plastics are essential to modern life, but their inherent poor mechanical, thermal and electrical properties limit advanced applications. Researchers from the Suzhou Institute of Nano-Tech and Nano-Bionics and partners reported in National Science Review a scalable in-situ CNT-polymer fusion and hot-working strategy. This method breaks the bottleneck of high-loading CNT incorporation into thermoplastic matrices, and develops novel CNT superplastics applicable to thermoplastic processing and 3D printing.

A recent work published in National Science Review report the first realization of a higher-order Weyl exceptional ring semimetal in a 3D lossy acoustic metamaterial. This study systematically analyzes the non-Hermitian topological properties of such metamaterial, and focuses on two types of higher-order topological phenomena: topological hinge states and hinge-dependent skin effect.

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.

The mechanism of high-temperature (T_C) superconductivity is a key challenge in condensed matter physics. Recently, Chinese scientists made significant progress in the study of high-T_C nickelate superconductors.

For the first time, scientists observed a nodeless superconducting gap and discovered electron-boson coupling by measuring the electronic structures of Ruddlesden-Popper bilayer nickelate superconducting thin films. These results provide crucial evidence for two fundamental issues in the mechanism of high-T_C nickelates: “superconducting gap symmetry” and “superconducting pairing mechanism”.

As pets become part of everyday family life, scientists are asking a new question: could the hair shed by cats and dogs help reveal the chemical pollutants circulating inside our homes?

Microplastics are now found across oceans, soils, food chains, and even human biological samples. Yet scientists still face a major challenge: these tiny particles are difficult to detect, track, and link to health risks using traditional laboratory methods alone. A new perspective article argues that artificial intelligence could help change that.

A new international study, published in Science Advances, fully accounts for what is driving the world's rising oceans over six decades.

A new study published in Big Earth Data systematically evaluates popular Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods and metrics for AI/ML-based geospatial applications, addressing challenges of predictive uncertainty, trustworthiness, and real-time integration in complex Earth system modelling. Using a PM2.5 calibration case study, it demonstrates that Deep Ensembles and Bayesian Neural Networks implemented in TensorFlow achieved the best reliability and calibration performance, while also highlighting framework-specific differences between TensorFlow and PyTorch in geospatial UQ applications.