A new defect-chemistry-informed phase-field model helps explain how charged defects at grain boundaries guide grain growth in oxide ceramics. Applied to Fe-doped SrTiO₃, the model shows that solute drag alone can produce skewed grain-size distributions and highly varied grain-boundary potentials, offering a route for microstructure design.

In hub-filament systems, radially converging filaments are known to channel dense gas into hubs where massive stars form, but the contribution of inter-filamentary diffuse gas has remained unclear. In this study, researchers mapped gas motions in the Monoceros R2 star-forming region using carbon monoxide observations. They found that diffuse inter-filamentary gas not only flows directly toward the central hub but also replenishes dense filaments, substantially increasing the total gas reservoir available for massive star formation.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers have developed a new model that can explain why increasing ultrasound past a certain point hinders chemical reactions rather than continuing to boost them. Their simulations revealed that the interactions between ultrasound waves and cavitation bubbles create sounds that distort the acoustic field and reduce reaction efficiency.

Kyoto, Japan -- Dark matter's existence is all but certain -- astronomers believe it makes up about a quarter of the universe's total energy content -- yet its true identity has eluded us for decades. Two of the leading candidates for dark matter are the hypothetical particles ultralight axions and dark photons, which in the range studied here would be some 19 to 21 orders of magnitude lighter than the electron.

Conventional axion searches tend to involve converting them into photons with the help of strong laboratory magnets. However, research in a laboratory inherently limits the space over which such a field can be applied. A collaborative team of researchers from Kyoto University, Hiroshima University, and Nihon University realized that, by contrast, Earth's own magnetic field spans a scale no laboratory could match.

"We asked ourselves whether we could use the Earth itself as a giant detector in the search," says corresponding author Atsushi Taruya. "The Earth-ionosphere cavity acts as a natural resonator that amplifies electromagnetic waves right around the mass range we wanted to probe."

-Professor Hee-Tak Kim's team in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering develops a process technology that cuts production time of electrolyte for vanadium redox flow batteries, a promising large-scale energy storage system (ESS) by 67%.

-Resolves the largest bottleneck to commercialization, with the catalyst maintaining performance over more than 2,500 repeated cycles; expected to accelerate the rollout of ultra-large batteries for AI data centers and renewable energy storage

Antibiotic resistance genes are now widely found in rivers, lakes, soils, animals, and people. Hospitals are often considered important sources because their wastewater can contain antibiotics, drug-resistant bacteria, and resistance genes. However, a nationwide study suggests that proper wastewater treatment and strict discharge controls can substantially reduce the impact of hospitals on surrounding water environments.

SAN ANTONIO — August 4, 2026 — A Southwest Research Institute-led paper documents how NASA’s Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere mission could greatly improve the ability to forecast the arrival of coronal mass ejections (CMEs). These vast clouds of magnetized plasma can disrupt satellites, power grids and communications when they strike Earth.

One of the most famous and intriguing results of quantum mechanics is the finding that fundamental particles, such as electrons, cannot be pinned down to one single location. Instead, a particle is described by its “wavefunction”, which allows researchers to derive probability distributions – a sort of mathematical map that shows the possibilities – of fundamental properties such as its position and momentum. In particular, the electron wavefunctions within a molecule, known as “molecular orbitals”, carry information about how the molecule interacts with its surroundings. For example, it shows how it may absorb light or how a chemical reaction might take place. As a consequence, knowledge of the complete three-dimensional wavefunction is highly desirable, but imaging the wavefunction has proven to be a major experimental challenge. An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Göttingen has now managed to image the three-dimensional wavefunction of a nanometer-sized organic molecule. They overcame the limitations by combining state-of-the-art photoelectron spectroscopy with powerful mathematical algorithms. The results were published in Nature Communications.