Fundamental breakthroughs in the natural sciences are rare. Progress is usually made in small steps, with knowledge slowly accumulating as more pieces of the puzzle fall into place. Now, however, chemists at Saarland University have made a major breakthrough: they have synthesized a stable molecule that chemists worldwide have been seeking – unsuccessfully – for decades. Their discovery has now been published in Science.

Researchers at Arizona State University and their international colleagues have developed a device that cuts sample consumption by as much as 97% while still producing high-quality structural data. The technology could accelerate drug discovery by showing how medicines interact with their protein targets in real time and help engineers design better enzymes for industry and biotechnology. It may also enable deeper insights into disease, enable the study of rare proteins that are difficult to produce, and unlock the full potential of next-generation X-ray laser facilities without excessive sample waste.

Excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, polluted water, and increasingly strict environmental regulations are driving the search for materials that can efficiently trap pollutants at the molecular level. For more than two decades, this challenge has drawn scientific attention to metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) – highly advanced porous materials widely regarded as one of the most promising tools for tackling climate change and environmental pollution.

In medicine, security, nuclear safety and scientific research, X-rays are essential tools for seeing what remains hidden.

The materials used to create X-ray detectors can be rigid, expensive and laborious to produce. But new research led by FSU Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor Biwu Ma is creating lower-cost, adaptable materials that could revolutionize X-ray detection technologies.

The Pauli exclusion principle is a cornerstone of the Standard Model of particle physics and is essential for the structure and stability of matter. Now an international collaboration of physicists has carried out one of the most stringent experimental tests to date of this foundational rule of quantum physics and has found no evidence of its violation. Using the VIP-2 experiment, the team has set the strongest limits so far for possible violations involving electrons in atomic systems, significantly constraining a range of speculative theories beyond the Standard Model, including those that suggest electrons have internal structure, and so-called ‘Quon models.’ Their experiment, which was partially supported by the Foundational Questions Institute, FQxI, was reported in Scientific Reports in November 2025.