Researchers report a room-temperature organic microcavity where two different forms of spin–orbit coupling act together to produce the optical spin Hall effect (OSHE), a way to route light based on its polarization “spin”. By tuning photon momentum (viewing angle), they observe two coexisting spin textures in one device: a quadrupole pattern at high momentum and a mirror-symmetric pattern at low momentum. The hybrid effect also sustains a long-lived polarization bias of about 300 picoseconds, pointing to robust polarization control for future spin-photonic and topological photonic technologies.

A comprehensive review published in Science China Life Sciences by a collaborative team led by Prof. Wenjie Shu (Bioinformatics Center of AMMS) et al. highlights that Protein Foundation Models (pFMs) have emerged as game-changers in life science.

These AI tools, trained on large-scale datasets, can predict protein characteristics and design new proteins with desired functions. This review explores the progress, uses, challenges, and future of pFMs. It looks at the diverse data—from genetic sequences to 3D structures and functional information—that these models learn from. It covers key AI methods and highlights real-world impacts in research, protein design, and medicine. The article also discusses major challenges, including data scarcity and the complexity of validating model outputs. Looking ahead, the review highlights promising developments, such as modeling protein interactions and building virtual cell systems, which have the potential to enpower the next generation of bioengineering. This comprehensive overview serves as both a valuable resource for computational researchers and a strategic reference for scientists using these tools in related fields.

Researchers at the University of Oulu, Finland, have developed a pine‑bark–based water‑treatment medium that efficiently removes antibiotics as well as residues of blood‑pressure and antidepressant medicines from wastewater treatment plant effluent. A new doctoral thesis reports promising results with a simple and low‑cost method in which pine bark was modified with iron.

Just as avalanches on snowy mountains start with the movement of a small quantity of snow, the ESA-led Solar Orbiter spacecraft has discovered that a solar flare is triggered by initially weak disturbances that quickly become more violent. This rapidly evolving process creates a ‘sky’ of raining plasma blobs that continue to fall even after the flare subsides.