An international team, led by Penn State’s Institute of Energy and the Environment Director Bruce Logan, has developed a new reactor design that efficiently converts carbon dioxide and renewable electricity into methane — the primary component of natural gas — while scaling the system up by roughly an order of magnitude without sacrificing performance.

What if your eyes could use light to heal themselves? Drawing inspiration from how plants harness sunlight, researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) are pioneering a revolutionary treatment for dry eye disease. Their approach uses a light-activated technology derived from the photosynthetic membranes of the spinach plant, enabling the eye to stay continuously hydrated. This offers a solution that is simple, effective and non-invasive.

To address the fire risks of lithium batteries, as well as the bulky size and limited power capacity of lead-acid batteries, a research team from City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has been awarded funding under the second batch of the “RAISe+ Scheme” to develop the next generation of aqueous zinc-based batteries that offer improved safety, higher power, lower cost and environmental sustainability. The team aims to establish a production line with an annual capacity of 1 GWh over three years. This breakthrough addresses large-scale energy storage challenges, providing future data centres with ideal backup power and improving the safe operation of AI facilities in Hong Kong and global markets.

University of Pittsburgh researchers Melissa Bilec, Federica Geremicca, and John Brigham, with University of Central Florida's Alessandro Fascetti, have built an interactive digital twin of Pitt’s Mascaro Center that allows users to “walk” through a 3D version of the building and assess energy use, air quality, and the materials in real time. Their research is advancing how we build, maintain, and automate buildings more sustainably.

Plastic recycling is advancing rapidly, yet hidden chemical additives remain a largely overlooked challenge. A new article in Engineering reveals that thousands of additives in plastics accumulate and degrade through recycling cycles, threatening material safety and circularity. The article notes key limits in detection and sorting, and calls for focused research on additive behavior, improved analytical tools, and greater industry transparency to build safer, more sustainable plastic recycling systems.

With artificial intelligence pushing today’s hardware to process, move, and cool more, Penn physicists led by Bo Zhen are looking to the electron’s massless counterpart, the photon, to shoulder more of the load. In a new study, the team has created hybrid light-matter particles that interact strongly enough to compute, pointing toward ultrafast, low-energy optical AI hardware.

Rolling bearings are critical components in heavy machinery, and their lubricant film thickness directly determines equipment reliability. This new study introduces a coupled elastohydrodynamic–acoustic framework for high-resolution, noninvasive ultrasonic measurement of dynamic oil film thickness in bearings. By accounting for elastic deformation and cavitation, the method greatly improves measurement accuracy and supports real-world industrial monitoring. It offers a practical way to assess bearing health and enhance operational stability.

Ultrasonic tracking in Hiroshima Bay shows that male and female black sea bream move differently during the spawning season, offering a novel discovery into the reproductive behavior of a broadcast-spawning sparid fish in the wild.