As the world marks UN World Cities Day on 31 October – a call to make cities more sustainable – a new international study warns that the global construction sector’s carbon footprint is on track to double by 2050, threatening to derail efforts to meet the Paris Agreement climate targets.

A fundamental link between two counterintuitive phenomena in spin glasses— reentrance and temperature chaos—has been mathematically proven for the first time. By extending the Edwards–Anderson model to include correlated disorder, researchers at Science Tokyo and Tohoku University provided the first rigorous proof that reentrance implies temperature chaos. The breakthrough enhances understanding of disordered systems and could advance applications in machine learning and quantum technologies, where controlling disorder and errors is crucial.

Scientists from Shibaura Institute of Technology have developed a power-free acoustic testing system that uses the sound of bursting bubble wrap as an impulse source. The system can detect foreign objects in pipes with a 2% error margin using wavelet-based sound analysis. This eco-friendly, low-cost approach eliminates the need for specialist equipment, making on-site inspections safer and easier, even in flammable environments.

Air pollution doesn’t just damage health - it can also make workplaces more dangerous, according to scientists from Yonsei University. Analyzing 5,873 safety liability accidents in China over 20 years, the researchers found that doubling PM_2.5 concentrations led to a 2.6-fold increase in accident probability, 37% more deaths, and 51% more casualties. The findings highlight a critical but overlooked dimension of air pollution’s social and economic burden.

An out-of-this-world idea: placing data centres in space could pave the way for sustainable computing with unlimited solar energy and free cooling, says scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore). The researchers outline a practical path to building carbon-neutral data centres in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), a concept particularly relevant to land-scarce cities like Singapore, where limited land and high real estate costs make conventional data centres increasingly expensive. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Electronics, the study presents a framework for how satellites equipped with advanced processors could serve as orbital edge and cloud data centres. The new paper asserts that space offers two unparalleled environmental advantages, virtually unlimited solar energy and natural radiative cooling enabled by the extreme cold temperatures. In addition, virtual models show that solar-powered orbital data centres could offset their launch emissions within a few years of operation.