Heating, cooling, and ventilation account for a substantial share of energy use in buildings, creating growing demand for materials that can regulate temperature while maintaining a comfortable indoor environment. Now, researchers have developed a multifunctional membrane that combines food waste derived biochar, graphene, and a phase change material to simultaneously store thermal energy, improve heat transfer, and manage moisture.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, the University of Oklahoma is helping build AI into the future of American science. Two OU-led research teams have been awarded nearly $1.4 million in funding under the DOE’s Genesis Mission, with a third researcher providing significant support for a Genesis Mission project being led by Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Long polymer chains are everywhere: in synthetic materials, soft matter, biological systems such as chromosomes, and mathematical models of filaments and knots. When many such chains are densely packed, they form what physicists call a polymer melt. In this crowded environment, each chain is constrained by the others around it. These entanglements are central to the behaviour of polymeric materials, but they also make the systems extremely difficult to simulate: as chain length increases, the time needed to obtain a new independent configuration grows very rapidly. For very large systems, conventional simulations can therefore become computationally prohibitive. A new SISSA study by Enrico Fornasa, Francesco Slongo and Cristian Micheletti published in Nature Communications introduces a different way around this bottleneck. Drawing inspiration from ideas in quantum computing, the researchers looked at the problem from a new perspective. Their new method, called Self-Assembly Monte Carlo, or SAMC, stops treating the system as a fixed tangle that must slowly relax; instead, it allows local bonds to break and reform, so that the polymer melt can reorganize more efficiently while still producing physically meaningful equilibrium configurations.

The Skala AI model, developed by Microsoft Research AI for Science, is now available through the CP2K software ecosystem. Thanks to Skala, researchers can perform quantum mechanical simulations of larger molecular systems while achieving a higher level of accuracy. In early 2026, Microsoft’s research division and the CP2K team at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding (CASUS) at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf started a collaboration to integrate the Skala AI model into CP2K. The global CP2K community is expected to test the AI model’s applicability to a wide variety of problems in chemistry, physics, materials science, and engineering.

Earth's inner core, composed primarily of iron with a small percentage of light elements, may enter a superionic state at extreme pressure and temperature, according to experimental results from researchers at Science Tokyo. Using laser-heated and electrically wired diamond-anvil cells, the researchers identified experimental signatures of superionic iron hydride at conditions relevant to Earth’s core. These findings provide new insights into the composition and dynamics of Earth's deep interior.

Optical computing offers high speed and low consumption for data compression and computer vision. However, most optical differentiators are static. The group in Nanjing University proposes a reconfigurable ferroelectric chiral nanostructure to dynamically control optical differentiation. By switching the electric field polarity, differentiation or bright-field imaging is actively selected within 62 μs. Biological edges are clearly identified while direct imaging is also achievable. This work opens new avenues for biomedical microscopy and artificial intelligence.

Researchers have developed a plug-and-play technology that enables customised biomaterials to be created using blue light, vitamin B2 and common biological building blocks.

Hydrogels have become essential to modern biomedicine, enabling advances in drug delivery, tissue engineering and wearable healthcare. Researchers have proposed an architecture-based framework for designing high-performance hydrogels beyond conventional, randomly crosslinked networks. Their review defines hydrogels with high-order structures, outlines four construction routes, including phase separation, molecular self-assembly, nanocomposite integration and polymer crystallization, and links multiscale organization to mechanical robustness, transport control and integrated biomedical functions.

This review assesses the state-of-the-art of functional liquid crystals with nanomaterials, including self-organized alignment enabled by nanotechnology, diverse properties of nanoparticle-doped systems, soft actuators and tunable structural color in nanohybrid elastomers, and provides critical perspectives on comparative advantages and remaining challenges.