China's pulp and paper industry is one of the world's largest industrial paper systems, but its true carbon footprint has long been blurred by national and provincial averages. 

Scientists from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, in collaboration with research groups from the Łódź University of Technology, the Warsaw University of Technology, and the Polish Academy of Sciences, have developed a structure that traps infrared light in a layer just 40 nanometers thick. To achieve this, they created a structure called a subwavelength grating using a special material – molybdenum diselenide (MoSe₂). They published their results in the prestigious journal “ACS Nano”.

The Organic Field Crop Production and Marketing Meeting will be hosted at the Vegetable Research Station near Kibler, Arkansas, on April 7 to connect grain farmers with organic market opportunities and to showcase ongoing organic research in the state. The event, which is free and open to the public, is focused on connecting growers interested in exploring organic production with buyers from the region to discuss market opportunities for organic grain crops. The organic field day also involves partners from the USDA’s Organic Agriculture Research and Extension Initiative project, as well as the Natural Soybean and Grain Alliance, the Center for Arkansas Farms and Food, Winrock International, the Rodale Institute, and University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture researchers.

To help meet the rising national and global demand for poultry products, the Center for Scalable and Intelligent Automation in Poultry Processing will hold its first field day on April 9 from 12:30-5 p.m. at the Don Tyson Center for Agricultural Sciences in Fayetteville, Arkansas. This free event will share what researchers have learned so far about developing new robotic technologies, including tools for deboning, detecting foreign materials and pathogens, and using virtual reality to operate equipment remotely. The event will not be recorded or streamed online.

Just before World Water Day, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) announces it will lead the new MountAInWater project, an ambitious endeavor funded by Schmidt Sciences with a grant of USD 9.5 million. Scientists will carry out the first-ever global reanalysis of mountain water resources using high-resolution models, assessing the effects of climate change on these critical water supplies, and identifying potential tipping points in mountain environments. To achieve this, the team from six countries will make use of a unique combination of field work, physically-based modeling and AI—and also engage with affected regions and communities. Their results will be a crucial resource in managing future water security challenges.

A multinational research team led by researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo, RIKEN, and the University of Toronto has revealed how a tryptophan-rich allosteric communication network regulates receptor dynamics and activation of the human adenosine A_2A receptor (A_2AR), a major G protein-coupled receptor (GPCR) drug target. By integrating experimental functional assays and residue-specific NMR with molecular simulations and fast allostery-prediction algorithms based on rigidity theory, the team mapped long-range allosteric communication pathways linking the ligand-binding pocket to the intracellular G protein–coupling machinery and identified a central role for tryptophan residues along these pathways. The study also clarifies the functional role of the receptor’s conserved sodium-binding pocket, showing that sodium egress strongly promotes activation-related conformational states, including a precoupled state that likely prepares the receptor for productive G protein interaction. These findings deepen our understanding of GPCR activation and allostery, and may support future development of allosteric GPCR drugs.

Beyond the specific mechanism, this work addresses a major bottleneck for AI in structural biology: recent advances such as AlphaFold have transformed prediction of static protein structures, but AI still cannot reliably predict the dynamics and allosteric communication that determine function, signaling, and drug response. To help close this gap, the researchers developed and applied fast computational methods for probing allosteric and dynamic regulation in protein structures and anchored these predictions with experimental NMR validation. The resulting experimentally validated, computationally generated data on allostery and dynamics—and a scalable approach to extend these datasets across diverse receptors and conditions—provide scarce, high-value training and benchmarking data for next-generation AI models aimed at predicting protein function beyond static structure, accelerating future AI-driven prediction of protein function and the design of selective GPCR therapeutics.