Scientists design an advanced digital twin technology that can significantly boost the performance, efficiency, and reliability of renewable energy storage systems. This innovative digital framework has the potential to alert operators of issues such as leaks, mechanical friction, or generator overloads in its physical doppelganger. The technology offers a sustainable solution for storing surplus renewable energy through compressed air systems and later releasing it to generate power on demand.

Single-crystal materials, characterized by structural uniformity and exceptional intrinsic properties, are crucial for high-performance device applications. A research team has now developed a universal method to produce large-scale single-crystal metal foils by establishing a fundamental correlation among strain, stored energy, texture, and single-crystal formation. The study reveals that sufficient deformation-stored energy is essential for generating a uniform cubic recrystallization texture, which reliably guides foils toward single-crystal conversion. This approach is compatible with cast, rolled, and electrodeposited precursors, and enables the scalable fabrication of single-crystal copper and nickel foils with both low- and high-index surfaces. These findings present a new paradigm for single-crystal metal manufacturing and lay a critical materials foundation for future industrial applications.

As the global population grows, producing enough food for everyone has become one of the biggest challenges in agriculture. Wheat, one of the world’s most important crops, must yield more grain from each plant to help meet this demand. A key factor in determining yield is the inflorescence architecture, the way that the plant’s flower head (or spike) is strucrured. This architecture controls how many grains each spike can produce and finally influence the yield of crops. Over the history of wheat breeding, changes in spike shape and structure have played a major role in yield improvements. In a recent study, researchers at Shandong Agricultural University explored a new way to boost wheat yield by re-engineering spike architecture. Through detailed multi-dimentional comparisons of inflorescence development among different cereal crops, the researchers identified promising directions for redesigning wheat spikes to produce more grains, which opens up an exciting path roward breaking burrent yield limits and helping secure global food supplies for the future.

The increasing accumulation of discarded plastics has already caused serious environmental pollution. Simple landfills and incineration will inevitably lead to the loss of the abundant carbon resources contained in plastic waste. In contrast, photoconversion technology provides a green and sustainable solution to the global plastic waste crisis by converting plastics into hydrogen fuel and valuable chemicals. This review briefly introduces the advantages of photoconversion technology and highlights recent research progress, with a focus on photocatalyst design as well as the thermodynamics and kinetics of the reaction process. It discusses in detail the degradation of typical common plastic types into hydrogen and fine chemicals via photoconversion. Additionally, it outlines future research directions, including the application of artificial intelligence in catalyst design. Although photocatalytic technology remains at the laboratory stage, with challenges in catalyst performance and industrial scalability, the potential for renewable energy generation and plastic valorization is promising.

The first generations of stars formed under conditions very different from anywhere we can see in the nearby universe today. Astronomers are studying these differences using powerful telescopes that can detect galaxies so far away their light has taken billions of years to reach us.  

Now, an international team of astronomers led by Tom Bakx at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has measured the temperature of one of the most distant known star factories. The galaxy, known as Y1, is so far away that its light has taken over 13 billion years to reach us.  

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), together with 11 international research partners, has demonstrated a record-breaking 430 terabits per second (Tb/s) optical transmission using a novel approach that extends the capacity of standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibers well beyond the original design.

The technology introduces a novel method that multiplies the usable capacity of certain spectral regions by up to three times. This approach exploits the properties of standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibers based on the ITU-T G.654 recommendation, which have been originally designed to operate with light at relatively long wavelengths, in the C and L bands of transmission bands. By using light with shorter wavelengths, in the O-band region, researchers were able to realize three-mode transmission instead of the traditional single-mode transmission. This effectively extended the optical fiber capacity well beyond the intended design by combining single-mode transmission in the E/S/C/L bands with three-mode transmission in the O band. The team achieved a new optical transmission record of 430 Tb/s in international-standard-compliant optical fibers, surpassing the previous our record of 402 Tb/s, which was also set in 2024. Remarkably, the new result was obtained using nearly 20% less overall bandwidth, resulting in a simpler system that demonstrates how existing infrastructure can be pushed even further without costly upgrades.

The new technology builds on standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fiber technology and has the potential to be applied to metropolitan area networks and inter-datacenter links, where high-capacity connections are increasingly in demand, and standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibers are already installed. The combination of high throughput, reduced complexity, and compatibility with existing infrastructure points to a more scalable and energy-efficient future for optical communications.

This achievement was reported as a post deadline paper at the 51st European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2025 on Thursday Oct. 2, 2025, at the Bella Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, and was partly supported by the Japan-Germany Beyond 5G/6G collaboration initiative.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has announced that, through joint research with KAIST, they developed a new technology that can implement stable quantum communication even in moving environments such as satellites, ships, and drones for the first time in the world.