Garbage left outside starts smelling unpleasant very quickly, especially in warm, humid climates that accelerate food decay. In ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology, researchers report a solar-powered lid insert that fits onto standard wheeled trash bins and helps combat the stench. In tests with real food, the lid insert efficiently breaks down acetic acid, the main culprit released from rotting waste that’s responsible for its odors, and continues working for more than a month. 

Measuring vitamin B₁₂ in food usually means bringing the sample to the laboratory. A new fluorescent sensor could help move part of that process onto something much simpler: a paper strip or cotton swab. A new study published in Biomedical Analysis describes a fluorescence-based strategy for portable vitamin B₁₂ (VB₁₂) detection in food samples. Researchers at Liaocheng University developed boron- and nitrogen-co-doped carbon dots (B, N-CDs) that emit bright blue fluorescence under ultraviolet light but become markedly dimmer when VB₁₂ is present. By transferring this sensing chemistry from a liquid assay onto filter-paper strips and a specially designed cotton-swab sensor, the team created two simple formats intended to make the detection step faster, cheaper, and easier to use outside conventional instrument-heavy workflows.

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has put the HoreKa 2 Supercomputer into operation. The new system will support researchers in their efforts to address complex scientific issues, such as climate, new materials, particle physics, energy, and mobility as well as AI research, more quickly. For this purpose, it combines powerful high-performance computing and modern AI technologies. The total cost of the facility amounts to EUR 17 million.

Researchers at Ritsumeikan University and collaborating institutions have shown that counteranions control the solid-state assembly of paramagnetic thiaporphyrin Cu^II complex cations and thereby tune their magnetic behavior. PCCp⁻ formed a charge-by-charge assembly without significant spin–spin interaction, whereas nonplanar counteranions promoted π-stacked cation dimers exhibiting antiferromagnetic interactions. These findings demonstrate that ion-pairing assembly can control molecular spin arrangements, providing a strategy for designing supramolecular materials with tunable magnetic properties for spintronic applications.

To simulate event cameras, which can capture brightness changes at microsecond-scale speeds, conventional methods render numerous frames from 3D scenes, resulting in high computational costs. Researchers from Japan developed an efficient method using physically based path tracing to precisely determine event timings. The efficient implementation using GPUs reduces computation time to as little as one-third of a naïve implementation, enabling more efficient training-data generation for event camera applications, including healthcare monitoring, autonomous driving, and robotics.

KANAZAWA, Japan — Spatial transcriptomics can reveal where thousands of genes are active across a tissue, creating molecular maps at single-cell resolution. But comparing two such maps is difficult: thin slices of tissue may be rotated, stretched, or otherwise distorted, so equivalent regions do not automatically line up.

Researchers at Kanazawa University and Sapienza University of Rome have developed a computational method that aligns these maps directly from the individual measurement locations and their gene-activity values. Called Domain Elastic Transform (DET), it smoothly reshapes one digital map to match another without first converting the measurements into a regular grid of pixels.

The research, led by Osamu Hirose of Kanazawa University in collaboration with Emanuele Rodolà of Sapienza University of Rome, was published online in IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence on September 15, 2026.