Researchers from the Department of Physical Chemistry at the Fritz Haber Institute and Freie Universität Berlin have revealed the arrangement of water molecules at the interface between liquid water and air. Their findings help to better understand interfacial chemistry, which is largely determined by the specific arrangement of the water molecules. The study shows that one parameter in particular - one that has been neglected until now - is of fundamental importance: the water twist.

A recent study published in Chinese Journal of Polymer Science, titled “Erosion-immune Layer-by-layer Deposition Enabled by Interfacial Buffering toward 20.21%-Efficient Pseudo-Planar Heterojunction Organic Solar Cells,” presents an effective interfacial buffering strategy to address this issue. By introducing a highly crystalline polymer buffer layer between donor and acceptor materials, the researchers achieved a high power conversion efficiency of 20.21%, among the highest reported for PPHJ organic solar cells.

Many plastic products are designed to be used only once, yet the material itself lasts for years. But a new strategy is addressing this problem by creating products that self-destruct on command, known as living plastics. These materials incorporate activatable, plastic-degrading microbes alongside the polymers. One team reporting in ACS Applied Polymer Materials used two bacterial strains that worked together and completely broke down the material within just six days, without making microplastics. 

A century after their discovery, cosmic rays—particles of extreme energy originating from the far reaches of the universe—remain a mystery to scientists. The DAMPE (Dark Matter Particle Explorer) space telescope is tackling this phenomenon, particularly investigating the role that dark matter may play in their formation. This international mission, which includes the University of Geneva (UNIGE), has made a major breakthrough by highlighting a universal feature of these particles. The results are published in the journal Nature.

30 April 2026 / Kiel / Mindelo. Tomorrow, fourteen Master’s students in the West African Master’s programme ‘Climate Change and Marine Sciences’ will begin their two-week training and research voyage aboard the research vessel POLARSTERN. Travelling from Mindelo in Cabo Verde to Bremerhaven, Germany, they will carry out physical, biogeochemical and biological measurements together with ten experienced scientists. This is the fourth time that the Floating University is taking place under the leadership of GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. This initiative significantly contributes to the goals of the UN Decade of Ocean Science and is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) as part of the WASCAL programme (West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use).

In collaboration with colleagues, experimental and theoretical physicists from Heinrich Heine University (HHU) Düsseldorf and Forschungszentrum Jülich have gained important insights into laser–plasma accelerator technology. As they report in two papers published in Reports on Progress in Physics and High Power Laser Science and Engineering, the polarization state of accelerated particles is preserved during this process. This finding is significant for a range of applications, including controlled nuclear fusion.

A physics-inspired model calibrated on 40 years of US congressional data pinpoints a spending threshold of roughly 1.8 million USD at which campaigns stop influencing who wins and start fueling polarization instead.