East Asia experienced a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of 2023. Researchers at the University of Tsukuba numerically simulated this event using an atmospheric model, revealing for the first time that this record-breaking heatwave was considerably amplified by an unprecedented marine heatwave in the surrounding seas.

The polar regions of the Sun remain among the least-explored territories in solar physics, yet they play a crucial role in driving the solar magnetic cycle, generating the fast solar wind, and shaping space weather throughout the heliosphere. Limited by the Earth’s position in the ecliptic plane, past missions have only provided oblique views of the poles, leaving their behavior and evolution poorly understood. This observation gap has left three top-level scientific questions unanswered: How does the solar dynamo work and drive the solar magnetic cycle? What drives the fast solar wind? How do space weather processes globally originate from the Sun and propagate throughout the solar system? The Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO), scheduled for launch in January 2029, aims to address this gap by achieving the first direct imaging observation of the Sun’s poles from high heliolatitudes. Using multiple Earth flybys and a Jupiter gravity assist, SPO will reach an orbital inclination of up to 75° (80° in an extended mission), with a 15-year lifetime (including the 8-year extended mission) covering an entire solar cycle. In order to achieve its scientific goals, SPO will carry a suite of remote-sensing and in-situ instruments to measure the vector magnetic fields and Doppler velocity fields in the photosphere, to observe the Sun in the extreme ultraviolet and X-ray wavelengths, to image the corona and the heliosphere up to 45 solar radii, and to perform in-situ detection of magnetic fields and charged particles in the solar wind. The mission’s vantage point will allow extended observation periods above ±55° latitude, including during the next solar maximum around 2035, when a polar magnetic field reversal is expected. By directly imaging the poles, SPO will provide invaluable insights, revolutionizing our understanding of the Sun and the space weather processes.

Researchers at Tohoku University developed a photonic router that can direct single and entangled (quantum) photons at unprecedented levels of efficiency. This may bring us closer to realizing superfast quantum tech.

A new study has revealed how tiny microbes in rivers and wetlands across China help clean up excess nitrogen pollution, offering fresh insights into the health of freshwater ecosystems and the global nitrogen cycle.

What happens when cows graze, carbon vanishes from soil, and climate change looms large? Scientists have a plan—and it involves a black, brainy material called biochar that’s transforming how we think about soil health in some of the planet’s most delicate landscapes. A powerful new study—published on July 7, 2025, in Carbon Research—has cracked the code on how to protect and even boost soil carbon in karst ecosystems, the stunning limestone-rich regions that stretch across southern China and beyond. 

The Jingjing Wu group at the National Key Laboratory of Synergistic Materials Creation/Frontier Science Center for Transformative Molecules (FSCTM) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, in collaboration with the Xiaosong Xue group at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently reported a novel biomimetic Schenck-ene/Hock/aldol tandem rearrangement reaction mediated by singlet oxygen and its synthetic applications. Using this tandem reaction, they synthesized four natural products, alstoscholarinoid A, masterpenoid D, leontogenin, and marsformoxide B, in a clustered, one- to four-step process from readily available, inexpensive naturally resourced molecules. The mild reaction conditions and high functional group tolerance suggest that this strategy could serve as a novel approach for molecular backbone editing of natural products. Computational chemistry studies further revealed the mechanistic details of the rearrangement reaction and the factors that control the different rearrangement pathways of the key intermediate hydroperoxide. This study, published in CCS Chemistry, provides new insights into the synthesis of related natural products and molecular backbone editing and reconstruction 

In a world-first, researchers from the Femtosecond Spectroscopy Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have directly observed the evolution of the elusive dark excitons in atomically thin materials, laying the foundation for new breakthroughs in both classical and quantum information technologies. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications. Professor Keshav Dani, head of the unit, highlights the significance: "Dark excitons have great potential as information carriers, because they are inherently less likely to interact with light, and hence less prone to degradation of their quantum properties. However, this invisibility also makes them very challenging to study and manipulate. Building on a previous breakthrough at OIST in 2020, we have opened a route to the creation, observation, and manipulation of dark excitons."