Researchers at Kyushu University have developed an innovative method that turns agricultural waste into high-purity, porous biochar with exceptional efficiency. The new technique, which uses pressurized carbon dioxide, overcomes a long-standing challenge in materials science: the trade-off between producing a high quantity of material and achieving a high-quality porous structure. This work provides a sustainable pathway for manufacturing adsorbents essential for carbon capture, energy storage, and other environmental applications.

The investigation, led by Md. Amirul Islam and Bidyut Baran Saha at the International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (WPI-I2CNER), focused on transforming Bangladeshi jute sticks, an abundant and low-cost biomass, into activated carbon. The team designed a custom Inconel reactor capable of withstanding high temperatures and pressures. In their process, carbonized jute sticks were activated at 800 °C using CO₂ at pressures up to 10 bar, a method that is cleaner and less energy-intensive than conventional chemical or steam activation.

Although the efficiency of organic solar cells has now risen to over 20 percent, there are physical limits that make it difficult to further increase their performance. A research team of Linköping University in Sweden, University of Potsdam, Paul-Drude-Institut in Berlin and other collaborators has now been able to demonstrate which physical processes limit a key parameter for the performance of organic solar cells. This opens up the possibility of overcoming the long-standing efficiency limits of organic solar cells.

Researchers from Tongji University present a comprehensive review of emerging optical techniques for sorting and detecting chiral particles. The review highlights advances in engineered light fields, nanophotonic platforms, and artificial intelligence that enhance the sensitivity, selectivity, and efficiency of chiral analysis. By comparing optical sorting and detection strategies across diverse platforms, the work outlines current challenges and future directions, providing a valuable roadmap for developing practical, high-performance optical technologies for chemistry, biomedicine, and materials science.

In recent years, marine heatwaves have been taking an ever-greater toll on the world’s oceans and their ecosystems. Amplified by increasing global warming, these events are occurring more frequently and lasting longer. The Arctic is not spared from this trend either, as it is warming faster than any other region on our planet. However, due to local processes and conditions, marine heatwaves in the Arctic differ fundamentally from those in non-polar oceans. A recent study, led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, summarizes how these events have developed over recent decades, what science knows about the driving forces behind them, and where there are still knowledge gaps to be filled. 

A team of physicists from the University of Southampton (UK), University of Warsaw (PL), Military University of Technology (PL), Institut Pascal, Université Clermont Auvergne, CNRS (FR), and CNR (IT) has developed a new class of tunable photonic devices in which multiple tiny laser beams spontaneously synchronize and behave as a unified, spatially extended, and coherent light source. Remarkably, this effect is achieved at room temperature using a simple system based on liquid crystals and organic dye molecules, opening new possibilities for low-cost and reconfigurable optical technologies.

Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo, have determined the molecular origin of line tension for a water nanodroplet on a surface. This tension is the force along the droplet edge where liquid, solid, and gas phases meet. Computational studies showed that at complete wetting, collapse of tetrahedral order in liquid water causes the line tension to change sign. An ice bilayer did not wet a hydrophilic surface, showing that local order can outweigh surface chemistry.