Drought is one of the greatest threats to crop yield and fruit quality worldwide. 

For decades, scientists have struggled to untangle the genetic complexity of crops with multiple chromosome sets. 

Agro-pastoral ecotone in Northern China (APENC) is a delicate boundary where farming meets herding—now under pressure from both environmental and human forces.

Researchers report an in-situ passivation strategy for pure-blue perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs), promising for next-generation displays, fabricated by vacuum thermal evaporation. Co-evaporating a phenanthroline ligand (BUPH1) with perovskite precursors coordinates Pb(II) and suppresses halide-vacancy defects, reducing non-radiative losses and spectral drift. Devices emit at 472 nm (FWHM 19 nm) with an EQE of 3.1%—among the highest for thermally evaporated pure-blue PeLEDs—and maintain color stability, compatible with the ITU-R Rec.2020 wide-gamut standard. Next steps target luminance and longer lifetime via additional passivation strategies, toward thermally evaporated device stacks for industrial manufacturing. Published August 25 in Industrial Chemistry & Materials.

SciOpen, a digital publishing platform for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals developed by Tsinghua University Press, has recently reached a major milestone: it now hosts more than 200 journals. This achievement not only highlights its strong capacity to attract high-quality journals, but also reflects its growing success in enhancing the global visibility of local journals. SciOpen has also drawn interest from international recognized institutions such as the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) and Tech Science Press.

Aluminum toxicity is a major barrier to crop productivity in acidic soils, restricting root growth and nutrient uptake.

Fresh-cut apple browning is a significant quality issue, often reducing the fruit's marketability. 

Every three seconds, one life is lost to sepsis, according to the Global Sepsis Alliance. It is a life-threatening, dysregulated immune response to infection and remains a leading cause of death worldwide. Most of these deaths are preventable with timely intervention.

Conventional culturing diagnostic methods are often slow and imprecise. The advancement of metagenomic and targeted next-generation sequencing (mNGS and tNGS) now provides rapid precision diagnostics, enabling earlier treatment.

Researchers have developed a breakthrough passive radiative cooling film based on a microsphere-polymer coupled metasurface (M-PCM), combining high performance, scalability, and reduced material usage. The M-PCM structure integrates a monolayer of hexagonally close-packed SiO₂ microspheres embedded in a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomer with an underlying reflective layer. Through engineered optical coupling between the microspheres and polymer, spectrally selective Mie resonances are activated within the atmospheric transparency window (8-13 µm) while suppressed outside it, yielding a strong infrared emissivity (0.96), high spectral selectivity (1.50), and exceptional solar reflectivity (0.96). This synergy enables a maximum daytime subambient cooling of 7.1 °C, verified in rooftop tests. The ultrathin, flexible M-PCM film can be manufactured by an industrial roll-to-roll process and integrated into building exteriors, vehicles, and water tanks, promising significant global energy savings and carbon emission reductions.

Chinese researchers led by Prof. WANG Wenda and Prof. TIAN Lijin from the Institute of Botany have revealed a breakthrough in understanding the light-harvesting efficiency of coccolithophores.