In a paper published in National Science Review, Prof. Xu proposes a new term "viral aggregation" to more accurately describe the accumulation of lysis products in the soil environment. In addition, he advocates that incorporating soil viruses into existing MCP and MinCP models, namely virus-MCP and virus-MinCP, can substantially improve our understanding of global carbon cycle.

In a paper published in Polymer Science & Technology, an international team of scientists

explores an effective protocol for toughening vitrimers based on dioxaborolane metathesis through introducing a reversible secondary interaction and revealed the underlying molecular mechanism of this protocol. They copolymerized hexyl methacrylate with hydrogen-bonding n-isopropyl methacrylamide and vitrimeric cross-linkers to prepare dual-cross-linked networks. They found the breakup of the hydrogen bonds during the elongation significantly dissipated the energy, leading to the softening of the materials, thereby facilitating the stretch to high strain. Then the Dobrynin model modified by Konkolewicz and co-workers upon including a strain rate-dependent element was used to capture the softening process. The deviation at a high content of hydrogen bonds was attributed to the coupled motion of the hydrogen bonds where the distance between hydrogen bonds becomes smaller than the Kuhn length. Modification of the model according to this change is considered an interesting future work. This study is led by Shilong Wu and Quan Chen (State Key Laboratory of Polymer Physics and Chemistry, Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Changchun 130022, China).

In a paper published in Earth and Planetary Physics, a team of scientists from China investigate impacts of mesoscale gravity waves on the evolution of sporadic E (E_s) layer in the ionosphere, using a newly developed model with an advanced dynamical core. The results reveal that mesoscale gravity waves affect E_s layers in various aspects, including inducing wave-like structure, dispersing the Es layer thickness, and enhancing the existing Es layers.

The intensity of offshore wind farm operational noise was significantly lower compared to pile driving noise. By employing a sound propagation model and referring to established noise exposure metrics, we estimated an impact zone of 12.8 m for fishes imposed by the pile driving noise. For the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins, the permanent (PTS) and temporary threshold shift (TTS) zones were predicted to be 32.4 m and 580.9 m, respectively.