A new review brings together research on geopolitical tensions, meteorological disasters, regional environmental degradation, supply chain disruption, systemic financial instability, and technology-mediated societal and institutional risks. It shows how shocks can spread through interconnected political, economic, ecological, technological, and social systems, and outlines a flexible cycle of risk identification, assessment, management, and adaptive monitoring supported by international cooperation.

Medical imaging datasets are essential for training artificial intelligence systems, but sharing brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans can expose patient-specific anatomical patterns. Anonymization must therefore do more than remove identifiers: it must make the overall image harder to link back to a patient while retaining the lesion information needed for segmentation and classification. Existing generative approaches often emphasize global image quality or facial de-identification, leaving lesion-centric utility and re-identification risk insufficiently addressed.

Korean researchers have developed, for the first time, a recyclable flame-retardant composite that overcomes a fundamental limitation of conventional flame-retardant composites, which cannot be recycled once cured, while maintaining excellent flame resistance. A research team led by Dr. Jin Chul Kim, Dr. Ji-Eun Jeong, and Dr. Young-Jae Jin at the Korea Research Institute of Chemical Technology (KRICT) has developed a self-reinforced composite (SRC) fabrication technology that simultaneously achieves improved processability, flame retardancy, and recyclability simply by adding a low-cost, low-molecular-weight polyolefin additive.

Alkaline-salt soils can quietly weaken apple production by damaging roots, disrupting redox balance, and limiting plant growth before yield losses become visible. 

Root elongation is a critical adaptive trait that enables plants to respond to soil conditions, yet woody fruit trees like apple suffer from naturally low root density—typically one‑tenth to one‑twentieth that of annual crops—limiting nutrient uptake, stress tolerance and productivity.

With the increasing scale of space infrastructure such as large space telescopes, antenna arrays, and solar power stations, the payload fairing size of launch vehicles has become a critical bottleneck constraining their development. On-orbit autonomous assembly via deployable modules has emerged as an important technical approach to overcome this limitation. Deployable modules typically exhibit high packaging ratios; however, the geometric deviations caused by residual strain, assembly tolerances, and dynamic coupling effects after deployment can significantly affect docking accuracy and structural stability, and may even lead to assembly failure. Nevertheless, existing studies have mostly focused on post-deployment final configuration accuracy optimization, with insufficient attention paid to the cooperative strategies between real-time deformation control and motion control during the assembly process. Moreover, a dynamic modeling method capable of accurately describing the coupling between variable-length flexible components and rigid bodies is still lacking. Therefore, how to achieve active configuration correction and coordinated position–attitude control of deployable modules on orbit has become a key challenge in the autonomous assembly of large space structures.

A single transcription factor may help explain how sweet osmanthus produces the layered floral fragrance that makes the plant valuable in food, cosmetics and perfumery. 

A research team has developed a long-acting injectable treprostinil depot that forms a drug-releasing gel inside the body, providing sustained pulmonary vasodilation for three to four days after a single intramuscular injection in rats with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).