Harvard researchers have created a layered semiconductor and metasurface optical device that exhibits strong nonlinear frequency conversion, including at near-infrared wavelengths.

SUNY Cobleskill Ag & Tech has received a $30,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) to build a prototype virtual reality (VR) course in agricultural engineering and lay the groundwork to test it with students, a step toward giving rural and place-bound farmers a way to gain technical skills without leaving their land. 

A new study published in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts reports a scalable strategy for producing multifunctional cellulose-based foam without relying on freeze-drying or solvent exchange. The researchers constructed a hierarchical network from bamboo fibers, TEMPO-oxidized cellulose nanofibrils (TOCNFs) and multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), followed by zinc-ion crosslinking and in-situ polymerization of polyaniline (PANI). The resulting foam combines low density, mechanical robustness and electrical conductivity with electromagnetic interference shielding and thermal protection. The optimized material achieved an EMI shielding effectiveness of 61.56 dB, a specific shielding efficiency of 2,375.2 dB cm²/g, a limiting oxygen index of 56.8% and a thermal conductivity of 0.085 W/(m·K). It also demonstrated electrically controlled heating and infrared camouflage, highlighting the potential of biomass-derived porous networks for multifunctional protection.

A study investigated how ingesting expanded polystyrene (EPS) affects wharf roaches, a common shoreline scavenger. EPS-fed animals showed no significant reduction in lifespan, but their guts displayed altered expression of genes involved in chemical defense, DNA repair, and digestion. Gut microbial communities were largely unchanged, although several rare taxa were detected only in EPS-fed specimens. The findings highlight the need for a more comprehensive understanding of how microplastic pollution affects marine ecosystems.

Researchers at the Boyce Thompson Institute and Cornell University have developed AIMe (AI Molecule Explorer), a neuro-symbolic AI tool that predicts, organizes, and searches mass spectra for more than 100 million known small organic molecules—creating a searchable map of chemical space roughly a thousand times larger than existing experimental libraries. Applying AIMe to gut microbiome data, the team identified a previously unknown, ring-shaped polyamine compound also found in human fecal samples, and used the tool to annotate millions of unidentified spectra in a major public mass spectrometry database.

Metal halide perovskites (e.g., CsPbBr₃) have emerged as highly promising scintillator materials owing to their superior optoelectronic characteristics. However, their practical deployment is constrained by intrinsic structural instability and nonradiative recombination-induced energy loss. Herein, they show that Ni²⁺ doping constitutes a potent regulatory strategy for synergistically improving the scintillation performance and environmental robustness of CsPbBr₃ perovskite. Various characterizations combined with threotecial calculation indicate that the incorporation of Ni²⁺ dopants triggers lattice contraction, thereby enhancing the resistance to environmental perturbations. Ni-doping also passivates intrinsic defects and traps, leading to marked suppression of nonradiative recombination pathways. This synergy in as-prepared Ni-doped CsPbBr₃ leads to an 11-fold enhancement in photoluminescence intensity and a substantial increase in photoluminescence quantum yield from 56.0% to 93.7%. Notably, it delivers an exceptional light yield of 38428.5 photons MeV⁻¹, a low detection limit of 64.9 nGyₐᵢᵣ s⁻¹, and superior radiation tolerance. Furthermore, a flexible scintillation screen containing Ni-doped CsPbBr₃ enables high-resolution X-ray imaging with a spatial resolution of 16.6 lp mm⁻¹, notably surpassing that of the majority of reported perovskite-based scintillators. This study provides profound insights into the pivotal role of metal doping into halide perovskites for enhancing environmental stability in radiation detection technologies.

We demonstrated a facile FJH strategy to achieve the controlled synthesis of atomically dispersed Cu species via ultrafast heating-cooling process. By systematically regulating the pulse parameters, we successfully anchored isolated Cu species with a well-defined local coordination environment. The optimized photocatalyst exhibits an approximately 10-fold enhancement in photocatalytic CO evolution under simulated solar irradiation, offering a promising new pathway for clean fuel production and carbon capture