A new study co-led by Professor Dazhi XI, climatologist from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), and Zheng-Hang FU, a Ph.D. student from Fudan University reveals that over the past decades, clustered tropical cyclone—storms that occur in close succession—are becoming less frequent in the Northwestern Pacific, including Hong Kong, Japan, and the Philippines, while becoming more common in the North Atlantic, affecting regions such as the U.S. East Coast and the Caribbean. The study, titled “Shifting Hotspot of Tropical Cyclone Clusters in a Warming Climate,” was recently published in Nature Climate Change.

The European Space Agency-led Solar Orbiter mission has split the flood of energetic particles flung out into space from the Sun into two groups, tracing each back to a different kind of outburst from our star.

Prof Heidi Newberg is an astrophysicist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses primarily on understanding the structure of our own galaxy through using stars. In a newly published Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences article, she and her co-authors lay out the case that a telescope with a rectangular mirror, rather than a roughly circular one as is used in traditional telescopes, could provide a clearer path to discovering habitable worlds. In the following guest editorial, she highlights the feasibility and advantages of this design.

Middle-ear effusion (MEE)—fluid trapped behind the eardrum—can quietly erode hearing, often without pain or fever. In a breakthrough simulation study, researchers used a finely tuned finite element (FE) model of the human ear to mimic six levels of MEE, from barely present to completely filling the cavity. The results reveal a tipping point: when fluid occupies less than half the middle ear space, hearing loss is minimal, averaging about 3 dB. But once it passes the 50% mark, sound transmission plummets, energy absorbance (EA) rates collapse below 20%, and hearing loss can soar to nearly 46 dB. This “fluid threshold” could sharpen diagnostic accuracy and guide timely treatment.

A study led by Jenny Frediani at Stockholm University has revealed a planet-forming disk with a strikingly unusual chemical composition: an unexpectedly high abundance of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in regions where Earth-like planets may one day form. The discovery, made using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), challenges long-standing assumptions about the chemistry of planetary birthplaces. The study is published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.