Oxford study outlines new blueprint to help tackle the biodiversity impacts of farming
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 17-Nov-2025 18:11 ET (17-Nov-2025 23:11 GMT/UTC)
A study led by researchers at the University of Oxford has developed a framework to help agricultural sectors better contribute to global biodiversity targets without causing unintended harms.
In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Physics,Mechanics & Astronomy, researchers discovered that the long sought cubic polymeric nitrogen was synthesized using lithium azide as a precursor. The work achieves the quantitative synthesis of cg-N with a higher mass content at near ambient pressure, owing to the inclusion of the lightest metal, lithium in the product. With respect to the fact that lithium has excellent ignition performance, the approach is promising for applications of polymeric nitrogen as a high energy density material.
To study growth-defence trade-offs in the context of metabolism in crops, scientists from the Universities of Potsdam and Erlangen, Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology, and the National Institute of Biology, Ljubljana, have generated the genome-scale metabolic model potato-GEM. The first large-scale metabolic reconstruction of its kind presents a useful resource to breed plant varieties with improved stress tolerance and high yields in the future.
Researchers at EPFL and Harvard University have engineered a chip that can convert between electromagnetic pulses in the terahertz and optical ranges on the same device. Their integrated design could enable the development of devices for ultrafast telecommunications, ranging, spectroscopy, and computing.