Polystyrene — common in packing peanuts and box inserts — is manufactured from fossil fuels. To develop a sustainable alternative, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Polymer Materials tested an unconventional starting material: sawdust. Their prototype foams incorporated cellulose binders and other additives to form rigid or flexible materials, and some versions matched polystyrene’s strength and impact resistance. A simple beeswax coating made them water-resistant, producing biobased foams with potential for packaging and building materials. 

Contact lenses are a great vision correction option for many, but if one of them gets damaged, there is little to do other than throw it away. A team reporting in ACS Applied Polymer Materials has a solution: special polymer hydrogels and UV light. Scratches on lenses made from their new material were easily repaired with an hour of UV light exposure. This demonstration is a first step toward the next generation of contact lenses. 

The European Research Council (ERC) has today announced the winners of its latest Advanced Grant competition. The funding, worth €838 million, will go to 319 leading researchers across Europe. The Advanced Grants give senior researchers the opportunity to pursue ambitious, curiosity-driven projects that could lead to major scientific breakthroughs. Among the awardees in the Physical Sciences and Engineering domain is Prof. Anton Wallner from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), whose project SUPREME has been awarded €3 million to reconstruct the history of nearby cosmic explosions over the past 500 million years and shed light on how nature creates its heaviest elements.

Magnetic quantum oscillations have been unexpectedly observed in insulators, where freely moving charge carriers are not expected to exist. A joint study by researchers from Tokyo University of Science, The University of Tokyo, and Kobe University investigated this puzzling behavior in the Kondo insulator YbB₁₂ using ultrasound. While no oscillations were detected in the insulating state, clear signals emerged after the material became metallic, offering new insight into unusual quantum behavior in next-generation materials.

Detecting gas molecules through light scattering is fundamentally limited by weak signals and environmental noise. To address this, researchers developed a non-contact optical sensing strategy based on inverse inference that avoids direct measurement of scattered light. Instead, it analyzes subtle distortions in a transmitted laser beam after interaction with gas molecules and decodes them to infer molecular information. By combining a graphene-based diffractive lens with deep learning, the system enables stable and precise ethanol sensing.

Kyushu University researchers have overcome a long-standing challenge of efficiently converting visible light into UV in solid materials through precise molecular design. By adding side chains to the sp³ carbon atoms of an organic molecule, they achieved high luminescence and efficient energy transfer in the solid state. The system reaches 1.9% conversion efficiency under weak light intensity comparable to sunlight, opening the door to applications including solar-driven photocatalysts, indoor air purification, OLEDs, and 3D printing.

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have used a classic optical phenomenon known as the “Poisson spot” to create stable patterns of light called “optical skyrmions”. Optical skyrmions are tiny, swirling configurations in the properties of light – akin to the spikes of a hedgehog. The team used a laser directed at a small circular disc, instead of the complex and costly engineered materials commonly used to generate these skyrmions. This new method gives scientists a much simpler way to generate, study and adjust optical skyrmions.

Skyrmions are currently a hot scientific subject as they hold potential to store information, paving the way for future data storage, communications and computing systems. Published in a leading scientific journal, Optica, the discovery was led by Nanyang Assistant Professor Shen Yijie from NTU’s School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.