Researchers find that soil aging of polyethylene microplastics has only a limited effect on their interactions with organic contaminants. Scientists have long worried that aging microplastics in soil could become increasingly effective at interacting with organic contaminants. But a new study shows that this may not be the case for all plastic types. Researchers found that while polyethylene microplastics modify as they age in soil, those changes have little effect on how they interact with various organic contaminants.

Researchers have developed a greener plasma-based method to create multifunctional nanocomposite films with smart optical and antibacterial properties. The approach enables simultaneous control of vanadium oxide structures and in situ formation of gold nanoparticles, producing materials with temperature-responsive infrared modulation and efficient photothermal antibacterial activity. This work provides a sustainable route toward advanced smart coatings and functional materials.

Researchers have developed a polymer-based thermal interface material (TIM) using vertically aligned carbon fibers bridged by graphene oxide. The composite achieves a through-plane thermal conductivity of 7.61 W/m·K at 25.2 wt% filler loading, with an exceptional enhancement efficiency of 162.9%. It also maintains a low compressive modulus of 6.91 MPa, ensuring excellent compressibility for practical electronic cooling applications.

Topological corner states are protected against defects and structural imperfections that is beneficial for robust information or power transmission. In turn, vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum can act as key carriers for information encoding. The integration of such states may enable robust topological photonic devices with large transmission capacity, yet fundamental barriers exist: zero-dimensional corner states reported so far in higher-order topological insulators with single-mode waveguides cannot readily accommodate vortices. In their article in Science Bulletin, a joint team of researchers from China and Russia has integrated them successfully and has shown that such states can exist in both linear and nonlinear regimes. According to the study, these corner vortex states exhibit outstanding robustness over a wide power range. Unlike vortex solitons in trivial lattices, they form without any power threshold, breaking the limitations of conventional vortex soliton generation. This work opens new avenues for topologically protected information transfer and wavefront control in topological photonics.

A research team led by Professor Hyoyoung Lee from the Department of Chemistry at Sungkyunkwan University has developed a new catalyst that converts carbon dioxide into ethanol with high selectivity.

Structures exposed to wind, waves or flowing water can be difficult to model and monitor, especially when reliable measurements are scarce. A research team has developed FSI-PINNs, a physics-informed neural network framework that links fluid pressure with structural motion. Using no more than 1% of a simulated dataset, the method predicted flow fields and beam displacement and identified unknown structural density, offering a possible new tool for engineering problems in data-scarce environments.