Carbonate cerium and neodymium isotope records from South China show that low-oxygen waters invaded shallow habitats twice during the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction, with a brief recovery between the two pulses. Earth-system models suggest that rapid climate swings reorganized continental weathering and nutrient delivery, amplifying marine oxygen loss and ecological stress.

Opto-electronic integration organically combines the high-speed modulation and transmission of light with the precise control of electricity, serving as a core enabler for the practical deployment of photonic quantum devices. A recent review article published in *National Science Review* by a joint research team from the University of Science and Technology of China, Peking University, National University of Defense Technology, and Nanjing University systematically summarizes this field. The research team reviews the progress of on-chip opto-electronic integrated technologies, introduces their applications in quantum light sources, quantum frequency conversion, quantum communication, and quantum computing, analyzes existing challenges, and prospects future development pathways. This work helps further optimize on-chip photonic quantum hardware schemes and provides references for the subsequent engineering development of scalable photonic quantum systems.

The research team from National University of Defense Technology systematically described the memory efficiency issues in the training process of large language models (LLMs) with Transformer architecture for scientific fields. As the scale of models continues to expand, memory requirements have become a key bottleneck restricting their applications in scientific fields such as biology, medicine, chemistry, and meteorology. The article systematically reviewed memory-efficient pre-training technologies at the algorithm level, system level, and software-hardware collaborative optimization, and combined with the AlphaFold 2 case, demonstrated how customized memory optimization methods can reduce storage overhead while maintaining prediction accuracy.

Direct photocatalytic oxidation of methane to methanol under ambient pressure offers an attractive route for C₁ valorization, yet it remains challenged by the competing requirements of activating inert C–H bonds while preventing methanol overoxidation. Here, a WO₃/BN interface is reported that addresses this activity-selectivity trade-off by regulating the balance of reactive oxygen species. Interfacial coupling with BN promotes hole extraction from WO₃ and induces electron accumulation in the WO₃ domains, thereby preferentially enhancing ·OOH generation and increasing the ·OOH/·OH ratio. The elevated ·OOH/·OH ratio balances methane activation and methanol formation. Specifically,·OOH radicals facilitate C–H bond activation in methane, whereas ·OH radicals react with the resulting *CH₃ intermediates to form methanol. The optimized WO₃/BN-1:1 catalyst achieves a CH₃OH production rate of 741.6 µmol/(g·h), nearly twice that of pristine WO₃, with a CH₃OH selectivity of 77.2% under ambient-pressure conditions. This work provides insights into regulating reactive oxygen species through interface engineering for the selective photocatalytic conversion of methane.

As a key strategy for reducing CO2 emissions, carbon capture and utilization (CCU) has gained increasing attention in the global pursuit of carbon neutrality and decarbonization. In particular, using a single material to achieve both efficient CO2 capture and photocatalytic CO2 conversion, thereby converting CO2 into high-value-added products, represents an attractive strategy. Such an integrated design can not only simplify the process flow and reduce energy consumption and costs, but also minimize losses associated with intermediate steps through in situ conversion, significantly improving overall carbon utilization efficiency. Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystalline materials that can not only serve as physical adsorbents for CO2 capture but also enable chemisorption through the rational design and optimization of secondary building units, organic linkers, and pore environments. Additionally, by engineering their electronic structures to optimize band structures and charge transport pathways, MOFs can serve as highly promising photocatalysts. Considerable progress has been made in the application of MOFs for CO2 capture and conversion. However, significant advances are still needed in the development of integrated MOFs-based systems that combine CO2 capture, enrichment, and in situ photocatalytic conversion. To accelerate progress in this area, a detailed review of recent developments is particularly important. Therefore, this review summarizes recent advances in MOFs-based materials for CCU, with particular emphasis on strategies for enhancing both CO2 capture and photocatalytic CO2 conversion. Finally, it discusses the current challenges and future research directions for developing integrated MOFs-based CCU systems.

Brian Christian was part of a team behind a landmark study that found that spending just 10 minutes relying on an AI tool significantly impairs our ability to focus and persist with difficult tasks. A preliminary draft made waves earlier this year, and the team presented the updated, peer-reviewed paper this week at the Conference on Language Modeling. “It’s a striking finding, but in a way it supplies ammunition for a story that a lot of us kind of feel in our gut,” said Christian, a research fellow with the UC Berkeley Center for Human-Compatible AI. “I experience it too.”