- University of Leicester scientists analyse the chemical composition of corals to spot the signs of deforestation

- Corals absorb trace elements in water into their skeletons, which provides a proxy for nearby soil erosion

- Fills a huge gap in environmental data on deforestation impacting coastal ecosystems

- University of Leicester’s science and innovation park to lead on a European Space Agency project to build a Double-Walled Isolator (DWI) to support analysis of extra-terrestrial samples

- Samples could be stored and handled and initially analysed in the DWI, to reduce the risk of cross contamination on Earth

- Work has started with funding of €5 million

In a paper published in National Science Review, a research team led by Chinese scientists quantifies changes in dissolved carbon storage within China's lakes and reservoirs alongside dissolved carbon fluxes in rivers over the past three decades, systematically revealing how climate change, anthropogenic disturbances, and water chemistry factors collectively drive the dynamics of dissolved carbon in inland waters. The study finds that dissolved carbon storage across China's inland waters has increased significantly during this period, with riverine carbon fluxes primarily driven by climate and human factors, while lake and reservoir carbon storage is dominated by water chemistry controls.

The SUNER-C project, launched in 2022 and funded by the EU's Horizon Europe programme, has officially concluded after three years of promoting solar fuels and chemicals as part of Europe's renewable energy transition. Its main mission was to build a strong, collaborative community and lay the groundwork for the future of solar-based energy solutions in Europe.

Researchers have long focused on the STING (Stimulator of Interferon Genes) pathway as a way to harness the immune system’s natural defenses against cancer. This pathway, which plays a key role in helping the body defend against potential pathogens, can be leveraged to trigger an innate immune response that targets cancer cells. However, a study published July 3 in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, led by biochemist Lingyin Li (Bluesky: @lingyinli.bsky.social), is spearheading a new school of thought.

Just over 200 years after French engineer and physicist Sadi Carnot formulated the second law of thermodynamics, an international team of researchers has unveiled an analogous law for the quantum world. This second law of entanglement manipulation proves that, just like heat or energy in an idealised thermodynamics regime, entanglement can be reversibly manipulated, a statement which until now had been heavily contested. The new research – released on July 2, 2025 in Physical Review Letters – deepens understanding of entanglement’s basic properties and provides critical fundamental insight into how to efficiently manipulate entanglement and other quantum phenomena in practice.

Like all complex organisms, every human originates from a single cell that multiplies through countless cell divisions. Thousands of cells coordinate, move and exert mechanical forces on each other as an embryo takes shape. Researchers at the Göttingen Campus Institute for Dynamics of Biological Networks (CIDBN), the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, and the University of Marburg have now discovered a new way that embryonic cells coordinate their behaviour. This involves molecular mechanisms previously known only from the process of hearing. The researchers attribute the fact that such different cells use the same proteins for two such different functions to their evolutionary origin. The results were published in Current Biology.