Microplastic pollution in agricultural soils is an emerging threat to food safety and ecosystem health, yet detecting these tiny particles at low concentrations remains a major challenge.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way designers brainstorm, visualize, and bring ideas to life—but its effectiveness depends on the form it takes.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a key aspect of our lives. Large language model (LLM) is an AI which can understand and generate human-like text. ChatGPT is an LLM which is gaining popularity. A new scoping review of 16 studies explores the role of ChatGPT in writing instruction in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting. The review highlights the effectiveness of ChatGPT in providing feedback, revising grammar, and idea generation. The review also highlights the limitations of ChatGPT.

The global freshwater crisis has become one of the most urgent environmental challenges. Solar interfacial evaporation technology demonstrates significant potential for seawater desalination. However, conventional evaporators struggle with a persistent trade-off between stable evaporation and salt accumulation, as crystallized salt obstructs water transport and reduces efficiency. Recently, a research team from Shandong First Medical University published a groundbreaking study in Science Bulletin, introducing a novel approach to desalinate high-salinity brine. Inspired by the natural salt secretion and brine transport mechanisms of mangroves, the team designed a bio-inspired solar evaporator featuring an external photothermal layer and internal water supply channels. This innovative design effectively overcomes the long-standing trade-off between stable evaporation and salt accumulation, achieving highly efficient and stable desalination alongside continuous salt collection under high-salinity brine conditions.

In a paper published in National Science Review, a Chinese team of scientists highlights the discovery of well-preserved blue-stain fungal hyphae within a Jurassic fossil wood from northeastern China, which pushes back the earliest known fossil record of this fungal group by approximately 80 million years. The new finding provides crucial fossil evidence for studying the origin and early evolution of blue-stain fungi and offers fresh insights into understanding the ecological relationships between the blue-stain fungi, plants, and insects during the Jurassic period.

Field and pot fertilization experiments on foxtail millet and common millet further suggest that the millet grain δ¹⁵N values can serve as reliable indicators of manuring practices, and the relationship between manuring levels and the δ¹⁵N values of archaeological millet remains was proposed. The δ¹⁵N values of ancient millet grains suggest widespread and intensive manuring practices in prehistoric North China.

Introducing an external photo field would effectively enhance electrocatalysis such as electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction reaction (CO₂RR), but suffering from the limited utilization efficiency of the photo-generated carriers. To address this challenge, a research team led by Professor Yuan-Biao Huang at the Fujian Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, Chinese Academy of Science, has successfully encapsulated metal halide perovskite quantum dots (e.g. CsPbBr₃) with high light-absorption coefficients, into a cobalt-porphyrin-based covalent–organic frameworks (COFs) host (COF-366-Co). The synthesized perovskite-COF composite material, effectively improve the performance of the photocoupled electrochemical CO₂RR.