Why do humans rely on XY chromosomes to determine sex, while birds use ZW — and many reptiles use neither, letting temperature decide instead? Sex determination is remarkably diverse across the animal kingdom. In genotypic sex determination (GSD), sex is encoded in the genome: XX individuals are female and XY males in humans and most mammals, while in the ZW system, found in birds and some reptiles, males are ZZ and females ZW. Many reptiles instead use environment-dependent sex determination (ESD), most commonly temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). In leatherback turtles, higher incubation temperatures produce females, and in American alligators, males emerge only within intermediate temperatures. Remarkably, XY and ZW systems have evolved independently many times from different ancestral chromosomes, raising the question of what drived evolution down one path rather than the other.

With the continuous advancement of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology, L-band SAR has come to play an increasingly important role in Earth observation; however, its imaging, interferometric, and polarimetric performance are susceptible to ionospheric disturbances. In equatorial nighttime data, amplitude streak artifacts induced by equatorial plasma bubbles frequently occur and have traditionally been regarded as interference factors in SAR imaging. Nevertheless, these artifacts essentially carry critical information on ionospheric irregularities and can be exploited to retrieve physical parameters such as scintillation intensity and turbulence spectral indices. Existing methods either rely on comparisons between disturbed and undisturbed images or are limited to preliminary one-dimensional parameter estimation along the track, making it difficult to achieve two-dimensional fine-scale retrieval of scintillation structures, and lacking systematic validation of their spatial correlation with equatorial ionospheric anomalies. Therefore, how to extract the two-dimensional spatial distribution of ionospheric scintillation parameters from amplitude streak artifacts and reveal their intrinsic relationship with regions of enhanced electron density has become an important scientific question in the field of ionospheric remote sensing.

Researchers found that combining sucrose with supercritical carbon dioxide significantly improved egg white protein’s foaming capacity, stability, and resistance to repeated freezing and thawing. The treatment produced stronger protein networks, helping preserve foam quality and offering a promising approach for managing frozen liquid egg white products.

Phosvitin, a rich phosphoprotein found in egg yolks, is the starting material for phosvitin phosphopeptides (PPPs), a powerful and potentially impactful dietary delivery agent to relieve oxidative stress that can lead to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Results show promise with PPPs, including increasing cell viability, free-radical reduction and inhibitory activities that promote cell protection.

Food‑medicine homologous polysaccharides are widely known for safety and immunomodulatory effects. A new Opinion article offers an updated perspective: these glycans are not merely bioactive ingredients, but multi‑role biological materials that can act as immune signaling molecules, structural scaffolds and drug‑delivery carriers simultaneously. The authors analyze key bottlenecks and propose cross‑disciplinary strategies to advance them from empirical natural products to rationally‑designed precision immune‑intervention tools.

For thousands of years, the concept of food‑medicine homology (FMH) has guided health practice in Traditional Chinese Medicine, yet its underlying molecular mechanisms remain poorly defined. A new opinion piece puts forward the “5R Principle” framework and outlines how multiple chemistry disciplines can transform empirical ancient wisdom into precise, testable molecular‑level health strategies, bridging traditional experience with modern quantitative science.

Chinese medicinal cuisine, known as yao shan, has long‑standing cultural roots in Traditional Chinese Medicine. A multi‑disciplinary Perspective puts forward a falsifiable systems‑science framework for its modernisation. Rather than simply adding modern technologies to old practices, the work converts traditional TCM concepts into testable scientific hypotheses, establishes causal research chains, separates quality‑safety‑efficacy evidence, and delivers a four‑stage roadmap to advance reproducible, internationally comparable yao‑shan research and application.

Polycrystalline ferroelectric ceramics can provide strong piezoelectric and electro-optic responses, but pores, grain boundaries and ferroelectric domains scatter light, making transparency difficult to combine with functionality. A new review systematically connects these optical-loss mechanisms with densification, grain and domain engineering, phase tuning and defect control in lead-based PMN–PT and lead-free KNN ceramics. It evaluates five coupled functions—piezoelectricity, electro-optic modulation, energy storage, photoluminescence and photochromism—and distinguishes ceramic devices from single-crystal, thin-film and glass benchmarks. The authors outline a roadmap based on machine learning, texture engineering, high-Curie-temperature design, additive manufacturing and system-level integration.

Enhancing low-light images with machine learning-based techniques becomes increasingly difficult as resolution rises. To address this challenge, researchers from China have developed LL-Refiner, a novel framework that first performs coarse enhancement at low resolution before progressively refining details at multiple scales. Tests on real-world datasets show that LL-Refiner achieves state-of-the-art image quality while also improving performance in computer-vision tasks such as depth estimation.