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.

We have developed a facile dip-coating method for fabricating ordered two-dimensional (2D) self-assembled block copolymer (BCP) micelle templates on substrates. Through point-to-point adsorption on these micelle templates, 2D non-close-packed, short-range ordered gold nanoparticle (AuNP) arrays were successfully obtained. The study elucidates the governing principles of critical processing parameters: the effects of withdrawal speed and micelle concentration on template morphology, as well as the influence of nanoparticle size and micelle corona thickness on the electrostatic adsorption process, thereby enabling the controllable fabrication of large-area 2D non-close-packed nanoparticle arrays. When employed as nanoscale floating gates in non-volatile memory devices, these BCP@AuNP composite arrays demonstrate superior performance—specifically, the incorporation of AuNPs broadens the memory window and enhances device operational stability compared to pure BCP micelle template layers. This strategy offers distinct advantages including operational simplicity, high efficiency, broad applicability, and cost-effectiveness, without requiring additional pre- or post-treatment steps. The entire process demonstrates substantial potential for industrial-scale fabrication of controllable 2D non-close-packed nanoparticle arrays.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has officially launched its twentieth data release (DR20), marking the third data release for the fifth phase of the survey (SDSS-V).