A new biochar-regulated catalyst can remove 96.9% of the widely used insecticide imidacloprid from water within 40 minutes, offering a promising route for treating pesticide-contaminated wastewater.

Dissolved black carbon, a water-soluble fraction of black carbon produced from incomplete combustion and biochar, has long been viewed as a mobile form of carbon that can move from soils into rivers, lakes, estuaries, and oceans. A new review published in Biochar shows that its journey through the environment is far more complex than simple transport in water.

NIMS succeeded in developing a technique to form a GaN epitaxial film with extremely low resistance and robust thermal stability, which is essential for realizing vertical gallium nitride (GaN) devices on low-cost silicon (Si) wafers. This novel technique, an “amorphous-like interlayer (AL-IL)” approach, uses an ultrathin film composed of Si and nitrogen (N) to accommodate lattice mismatch between Si and GaN, and enables vertical current flow between the substrate and the GaN film. This achievement constitutes a fundamental technology for fabricating vertical GaN devices on Si wafers, and is expected to contribute to reducing the cost of high-efficiency power devices and micro-LED devices in the future. This research result was published in Advanced Physics Research on May 29, 2026.

A team of astronomers, led by Brooke Kotten of the University of Michigan, has shown that TOI-5882—a sun-like star located some 1,300 light-years away—has likely eaten one of its planets.

SAN ANTONIO — June 15, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) recently received a patent for its EZ Flow™ technology, which reduces the viscosity of heavy crude oil by 40 to 60%. Developed through internal research funding, EZ Flow could help address a significant barrier for utilizing heavy crude oil in North America.

Advances in structural biology have allowed scientists to determine molecular structures with atomic‑level detail, sometimes yielding static snapshots that do not reflect the dynamism of proteins. However, these motions are often crucial for biological function. Researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) together with international collaborators have now combined several methods to shed light on how proteins ‘breathe’ and how some experimental techniques freeze their motion. The findings—which could boost protein design approaches and improve AI-based structural prediction tools—were published in Nature Chemistry.

For more than a hundred years, chemists have been building complex molecules step by step – bond by bond, atom by atom. But what if, instead of painstakingly reassembling molecules, they could be directly "rewritten"? This is exactly what a research team led by organic chemist Nuno Maulide from the University of Vienna has now achieved. In a recently published paper, the researchers describe a method that allows one of the most important classes of molecules in chemistry – called N-methylamines – to be directly and selectively transformed into significantly more complex structures. This lays the foundation for modern drug research: with the new method, hundreds of variants of a molecule can be easily prepared. The work was published in Nature Chemistry.

A CUHK-led team has developed an integrated all-optical signal processor (OSP) that corrects signal distortion directly in light form, reducing latency and energy use compared with conventional digital signal processors (DSP). Built on a silicon photonic chip, it can perform real-time signal equalization in the optical domain and achieve 1.6 Tb/s throughput with under 60 picoseconds latency and extremely low power consumption, while flexibly compensating various transmission impairments, including fiber dispersion, system bandwidth limitation, and nonlinearities. Published in Science, the breakthrough offers a high-bandwidth, low-latency, and energy-efficient solution for high-speed AI data centre interconnects and marks progress toward using light for both data transmission and processing.