The flagellar tails of bacteria rotate clockwise or counterclockwise because of active mechanical forces that pressure the individual ‘teeth’ of a gear to cooperate. This revises a decades-old model of how bacteria tails switch their rotational direction. The study, led by scientists at the Flatiron Institute, appears in Nature Physics.

Physicists from Trinity College Dublin believe new insights into the behaviour of light may offer a new means of solving one of science’s oldest challenges – how to turn heat into useful energy. Their theoretical leap forwards, which will now be tested in the lab, could influence the development of specialised devices that would ultimately increase the amount of energy we can capture from sunlight (and lamps and LEDs) and then repurpose to perform useful tasks.

Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer a clean alternative to fossil fuel-based power generation, but their high operating temperatures hinder widespread use. In a recent study, researchers from Japan developed ultra-thin, highly ordered samarium-doped cerium oxide electrolyte films that overcome the long-standing issue of grain boundary resistance, enabling efficient operation at much lower temperatures. Their design achieved record-setting oxide-ion conductivity and paves the way for safer, more affordable SOFCs for sustainable power generation.

In the first quantitative roadmap covering the entire forest-biomass value chain, researchers show that integrating selective harvesting, residue valorisation and advanced catalytic refining could raise carbon-use efficiency above 85 % and generate an annual mitigation wedge of 2.2 Gt CO₂—comparable to eliminating global aviation emissions twice over. The study, published today in Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, pinpoints lignin recalcitrance and volatile bio-chemical prices as the twin barriers preventing the sector from moving from pilot glory to gigatonne scale, and calls for an international “carbon-smart biorefinery” programme modelled on semiconductor R&D alliances.

When the cell’s recycling stations, the lysosomes, start leaking, it can become dangerous. Toxic waste risks spreading and damaging the cell. Now, researchers at Umeå University have revealed the molecular sensors that detect tiny holes in lysosomal membranes so they can be quickly repaired – a process crucial for preventing inflammation, cell death, and diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

A new international analysis published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on 9 January finds that the Earth’s ocean stored more heat in 2025 than in any year since modern measurements began.

A research team led by Profs. WANG Song and ZHU Yongping from the Institute of Process Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has developed a new approach to suppressing the shuttle effect in transition metal fluoride cathodes. The team's study focused on thermal batteries—a type of battery that operates at 350–550 °C.

Existing sea surface height prediction models require excessive computing power and training times and suffer from progressive error accumulation, limiting their accuracy to 14–15 days in the future. A team of researchers recently developed a lightweight deep learning model called GTU-Net with unique loss function and physical constraints that improve the reliability of medium- and long-range sea surface height predictions to improve long-term ocean monitoring, climate studies and operational ocean forecasting.

Topological photonics promises robust light transport immune to disorder, but existing linear systems are essentially static and cannot be reconfigured after fabrication. Now, a collaboration of researchers have shown that picosecond time-scale reconfigurable topological routing can be achieved using nonlinear physics in driven-dissipative exciton–polariton lattices, and proved its topology using a real-space framework. This advance will enable adaptive and disorder-immune photonic circuitry for next-generation communication, quantum, and ultrafast optical technologies.