A research team at Saitama University has developed a sustainable strategy for converting polyamide microplastics into defect-engineered carbon quantum dots and incorporating them into poly(vinyl alcohol) films for food-packaging applications. The resulting transparent, flexible, luminescent composite films showed tunable optical properties, strong UV-blocking performance, good photostability, and the ability to reduce fruit weight loss during grape storage tests.

Researchers at the University of Osaka developed chiral hole-transport materials that selectively conduct electrons according to spin. Across three classes of materials, molecular handedness consistently determined the direction of spin polarization. The homochiral material also showed nearly threefold higher hole mobility and improved charge extraction and surface passivation in perovskite solar cells, highlighting new possibilities for controlling spin, charge transport, and interfaces through molecular design.

• KAIST and Yonsei University College of Medicine develop a miniaturized wireless brain implant capable of drug delivery, light stimulation, and IoT-based remote control

• A researcher in Chicago successfully operates a brain implant in Daejeon, Korea, in real time — demonstrating the feasibility of location-independent brain research

• Enables long-term, repeated experiments in freely moving animals, paving the way for advances in addiction, depression, and neurodegenerative disease research, as well as next-generation smart implantable therapies.

A team led by an engineer at Penn State has developed a way to identify the bacteria responsible for a bloodstream infection — a main cause of sepsis. Using their new technique, the researchers condensed a days-long diagnosis timeline to just hours, potentially offering an approach that could help clinical treatment decision-making that avoids worsening antibiotic resistance in the bacterial strains behind infections. 

A new award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) totaling $19.5 million over four years will expand robotic systems, analytical instrumentation and dedicated staff at the Automated Synthesis Facility at Scripps Research by supporting a collaborative effort among Scripps Research, UCLA and Sunthetics (an AI-for-chemistry company) to establish a nationally accessible, fully automated chemistry laboratory. This “Chemistry Node” will be one of 20 AI-enabled NSF Test Bed: Toward a Network of Programmable Cloud Laboratory (NSF PCL) nodes across the United States, which will test, scale and demonstrate new methods and tools that advance automated science and engineering, driving discoveries across a wide range of fields. 

Binghamton University welcomes four Simons Empire Faculty Fellows in mathematics and physics. The Simons Foundation and Simons Foundation International established the fellowship program to stimulate faculty hiring in mathematics and the sciences across New York state