From waste to valuable resource: Chemists at the University of Copenhagen have developed a method to convert plastic waste into a climate solution for efficient and sustainable CO₂ capture. This is killing two birds with one stone as they address two of the world’s biggest challenges: plastic pollution and the climate crisis.From waste to valuable resource: Chemists at the University of Copenhagen have developed a method to convert plastic waste into a climate solution for efficient and sustainable CO₂ capture. This is killing two birds with one stone as they address two of the world’s biggest challenges: plastic pollution and the climate crisis.

But a recent discovery by a multi-university collaboration of researchers, led by Drexel University researcher Yury Gogotsi, PhD, and Drexel alumnus Babak Anasori, PhD, who is now an associate professor at Purdue University, that sheds light on the thermodynamics undergirding the materials’ unique structure and behavior, could be the key to supercharging the development of two-dimensaional materials with artificial intelligence technology. The discovery was recently reported in the journal Science.

A team at CU Boulder has made a curious state of matter in which particles move constantly—like a clock with hands and gears that spin forever, even without electricity to keep them going.

Adaptive camouflage that can operate across both the visible and infrared spectrum has long been a goal for defense and photonics research, offering practical advantages in extreme and dynamic environments. Researchers from Zhejiang University and Westlake University have now demonstrated a multilayer design that integrates thermochromic, electrochromic, and thermoelectric control to achieve wide-range, independent dual-band camouflage. The breakthrough, published in PhotoniX, achieves record thermal modulation and scalable multipixel integration, paving the way for next-generation multispectral stealth technologies.

Graphene is an extraordinary material – a sheet of interlocking carbon atoms just one atom thick that is stable and extremely conductive. This makes it useful in a range of areas, such as flexible electronic displays, highly precise sensors, powerful batteries, and efficient solar cells. A new study – led by the University of Göttingen, working together with colleagues from Braunschweig and Bremen in Germany, and Fribourg in Switzerland – now takes graphene’s potential to a whole new level. Researchers have directly observed “Floquet effects” in graphene for the first time. This resolves a long-standing debate: Floquet engineering – a method in which the properties of a material are very precisely altered using pulses of light – also works in metallic and semi-metallic quantum materials such as graphene. The study was published in Nature Physics.