A new study shows that combining water management with biochar application could transform drained agricultural peatlands from greenhouse gas emitters into powerful carbon sinks, offering a promising pathway for climate change mitigation.

A new study reports a breakthrough in sustainable energy materials by transforming biomass into a high-performance catalyst that could replace expensive platinum in fuel cells and metal-air batteries.

Uranium contamination is an urgent environmental challenge with serious implications for ecosystems and human health. A new review highlights how biochar, a carbon-rich material made from waste biomass, could offer a sustainable and cost-effective solution for removing uranium from polluted water and soil.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have uncovered a path to design superionic polymer electrolytes for solid-state batteries and other energy applications that could help ensure a future of abundant and reliable energy for the United States. The scientists demonstrated that by carefully controlling the chemical composition of a lithium salt-based polymer, they could create a material that enables superfast transport of ions in batteries and many other energy storage and conversion technologies.

A research team has uncovered the genomic basis behind why some vine tea varieties accumulate far more dihydromyricetin than others.

Researchers have developed a decision-aware forecasting framework for photovoltaic-battery energy storage systems, or PV-BESS, that improves how solar generation is predicted for day-ahead scheduling. Instead of treating forecasting and operational decision-making as two separate steps, the new approach trains the forecasting model to account directly for downstream scheduling objectives such as economic return and output smoothness. The result, according to the study, is a system that not only predicts well, but also helps the storage system operate more profitably and more stably.

Researchers have identified how in-plane temperature gradients inside lithium-ion batteries can either protect cells during fast charging or dramatically accelerate their degradation, offering a new way to think about battery thermal management. The study suggests that not all temperature gradients are harmful by default. Instead, performance depends on whether the hotter regions inside the battery are spatially aligned with the areas carrying higher current density.

Microsatellite-stable colorectal cancer, which accounts for roughly 80–85% of cases, remains largely refractory to immune checkpoint inhibitors compared with microsatellite instability-high tumors. This review synthesizes current evidence on tumor-intrinsic and microenvironmental mechanisms underlying immune checkpoint inhibitor resistance in microsatellite-stable colorectal cancer—including low neoantigen burden and impaired antigen presentation, activation of Wnt/β-catenin and MAPK signaling that exclude T cells, an immunosuppressive cellular milieu (regulatory T cells, myeloid-derived suppressor cells, M2-like tumor-associated macrophages, cancer-associated fibroblasts), metabolic reprogramming, and gut microbiome dysbiosis—and evaluates translational strategies aimed at overcoming these barriers. Preclinical and early-phase clinical data indicate that rational, mechanism-guided combinations (vascular normalization, myeloid reprogramming, metabolic inhibitors, antigen-priming approaches, and microbiome modulation) can enhance immune infiltration and produce benefits in biomarker-defined subgroups. Moving the field forward will require biomarker-driven, adaptive clinical trials with embedded translational endpoints to optimize patient selection and manage toxicity.

Chiral nanomaterials have great potential for enhancing clinical therapeutic efficacy, attributed to the distinctive chiral selectivity in biosystems. Herein, we designed chiral iron single-atom nanoenzymes (L/D-Cys@SAFe/NC) that exhibit remarkable tumor microenvironment-triggered catalytic therapeutic activity, by simultaneously depleting GSH and generating potent reactive oxygen species in cancer cells. Under laser irradiation, they displays photothermal-enhanced catalytic activities. The study of L/D-Cys@SAFe/NC on cancer cells shows that D-Cys@SAFe/NC exhibits stronger cytotoxicity than L-Cys@SAFe/NC due to the stronger internalization ability, also supported by the higher efficiency of cancer therapy of D-Cys@SAFe/NC in vivo. This research demonstrates that the chirality of the surface ligand of the nanomaterials could exert a substantial impact on their efficacy in treating cancer, which opens a novel way for the advancement of anticancer nanomedicine