Two Amendments, Two Pathways

Maintaining soil organic carbon is important for agricultural productivity and climate mitigation, yet organic amendments do not necessarily build soil carbon in the same way. A 10-year maize field experiment at Shenyang Agricultural University compared annual biochar application at 2.625 t ha⁻¹ with maize stover incorporation at approximately 7.5 t ha⁻¹, alongside an untreated control. The field plots received the treatments for ten consecutive crop seasons before soil was sampled at depths of 0–20, 20–40, and 40–60 cm.

Both amendments significantly increased soil organic carbon across the 0–60 cm profile. In the topsoil, carbon gains were similar for biochar and stover, at 49.70% and 48.87%, respectively. Stover produced larger increases in subsurface and deep-soil carbon, reaching 105.90% in the 20–40 cm layer and 32.35% in the 40–60 cm layer. Biochar produced corresponding increases of 72.81% and 4.74%. These contrasting depth patterns indicate that carbon accumulation depends on amendment-specific transport and stabilization processes.

Groundwater contamination is a growing global challenge, but predicting how pollutants behave underground remains difficult. A new review suggests that an often overlooked property of sediments, their ability to donate and accept electrons, could provide scientists and engineers with a powerful way to understand contaminant transformation and design more efficient groundwater remediation strategies.

Soil may look quiet, but beneath the surface lies a highly connected microbial world. A new study across China’s Loess Plateau shows that different groups of soil bacteria play sharply different roles in building complex and stable microbial communities, offering new insights into how belowground ecosystems may respond to environmental change.

A Food-System Carbon Shift

Tropical islands support important terrestrial and coastal carbon stores while facing strong pressures from development, land conversion, tourism, and climate change. In Hainan Island, food production, aquaculture, processing, and associated supply-chain activities have become increasingly important sources of greenhouse gas emissions within a rapidly developing regional economy.

Authors Zichen Li, Zhaohai Bai, and colleagues from Hainan University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Nanjing University reconstructed the carbon budget of Hainan's food system from 1952 to 2020. Their life cycle assessment framework incorporated offshore ecosystems, land-use and land-use change, crop cultivation, livestock, aquaculture, food processing and consumption, wastewater treatment, and on-farm and off-farm energy use.

Seven Decades of Rising Emissions

Gross food-system emissions increased from 3.29 Mt CO₂ eq in 1952 to 15.13 Mt CO₂ eq in 2020. The analysis attributes this rise principally to fertilizer-related emissions, expansion of tropical crop cultivation, aquaculture growth, and increased energy demand along the food value chain. Nitrogen fertilizer application increased from 223 kg ha⁻¹ to 627 kg ha⁻¹ over the historical period.

A Changing Carbon Balance

Soil organic carbon supports soil health, water retention, nutrient cycling, soil structure, and microbial diversity. A review led by Nanthi Bolan examines how climate change-induced droughts, floods, and wildfires can alter these functions by changing carbon inputs, decomposition, erosion, and the movement of dissolved organic carbon.

The analysis places soil carbon within the wider climate system. Depending on environmental conditions and land management, soils can either store carbon or contribute to greenhouse-gas emissions. The authors argue that protecting soil carbon is important not only for climate mitigation but also for sustaining agricultural productivity and ecosystem services.

Mapping the Evidence

On 14 January 2026, the authors searched Google Scholar, PubMed, and Web of Science using terms related to climate change, extreme weather, soil carbon, microbial activity, decomposition, erosion, dissolved organic matter, and leaching. The initial search produced 14,218 records. After duplicate removal and eligibility screening, 3,754 articles were retained for bibliometric and qualitative analysis.

Engineering Porous Carbon

Electromagnetic-wave pollution and electromagnetic interference are growing concerns alongside the expansion of 5G and 6G communications, radar systems, the Internet of Things, and high-speed electronics. Researchers from Shenyang Aerospace University, AVIC Shenyang Aircraft Co. Ltd., Shenyang Agricultural University, and the Institute of Strength Physics and Materials Science SB RAS developed lightweight carbon aerogels designed to address both microwave absorption and heat management.

The materials were prepared from chitosan and chitin nanofibrils using directional freezing, carbonization, solvothermal deposition, and a second carbonization step. Adjusting the relative content of the rigid chitin nanofibrils altered the pore architecture from vertically layered structures to aligned, straight-through polygonal channels. Rational pore-structure control allowed the researchers to tune electrical conductivity, dielectric response, impedance matching, and electromagnetic-energy dissipation.

CoNi Components Add Magnetic Loss

CoNi-based metal–organic frameworks were deposited in situ onto the carbon aerogel skeleton and converted into CoNi@C components during carbonization. Microscopy, X-ray diffraction, spectroscopy, and elemental mapping confirmed the porous carbon framework, graphitized carbon, nitrogen-containing structures, and dispersed CoNi alloy nanocrystals.

Tracking a Missing Kinetic Dimension

Dissolved black carbon (DBC) is a mobile, redox-active fraction of carbon formed during biomass combustion and pyrolysis. Although electron-donating and electron-accepting capacities describe how much charge a material can exchange, they do not indicate how quickly that exchange occurs. Work led by Yufei Wu, Peng Zhang, Zhaofeng Chang, and Bo Pan at Kunming University of Science & Technology quantified the apparent heterogeneous electron-transfer rate constant, k₀, as a kinetic measure of DBC reactivity.

Comparing Carbon Sources and Temperatures

The team examined 10 DBC samples produced from rice straw and sawdust at pyrolysis temperatures of 200–600 °C. Cyclic voltammetry and differential pulse voltammetry were conducted with a three-electrode system, while particle-size analysis and mediated electrochemical measurements characterized diffusion and electron-exchange properties. Fourier transform-ion cyclotron resonance mass spectrometry (FT-ICR MS) was used to resolve molecular formulas and assign compound classes. Microbial electrochemical systems containing Shewanella oneidensis MR-1 were used to assess how DBC affected extracellular electron transfer.

A team led by Professors Weidong Zhang (Naval Medical University) and Yu Zhang (Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine) has discovered PamUGT, the first triterpenoid glycosyltransferase ever identified from the medicinal plant Phytolacca americana(American pokeweed). Remarkably, this single enzyme can attach sugar molecules to an unusually broad range of natural products — triterpenes, flavonoids, diterpenes, and even phenols and alkaloids — acting as a “molecular sewing machine” for natural product glycosylation. Published in Chinese Journal of Natural Medicines (2026, 24(8): 999-1005), the finding fills a key gap in pokeweed saponin biosynthesis and offers a versatile, ready-to-use biocatalytic tool for drug modification and synthetic biology.

As high-value orbital regions become increasingly congested, pursuit–evasion confrontations among spacecraft have emerged as a critical issue in the field of space security. Active defense strategies, in which a target spacecraft releases defensive vehicles to implement counter-interception against the pursuer, constitute a three-body engagement scenario involving the target, the pursuer, and the defender. However, in actual engagements, the presence of observation noise, incomplete information, and multi-strategy adversarial conditions arising from uncertain pursuit policies render existing guidance methods—whether based on unilateral optimal control, differential games, or conventional reinforcement learning—incapable of simultaneously addressing the multiple challenges posed by unknown pursuit strategies, information deficiencies, and high-maneuverability confrontations. Consequently, how to achieve cooperative adaptive guidance between the target and the defender under conditions of incomplete observations and variable pursuit policies has become a key technological bottleneck for enhancing spacecraft survivability.

Purple pak choi gets its striking color from anthocyanins—potent antioxidants that boost nutritional value.