As India grapples with searing heat and an erratic monsoon, a perspective paper reveals the crisis is worse than thought—and offers a surprising ray of hope.

As the world searches for better ways to manage waste biomass and clean up polluted environments, a growing body of research is focusing on biochar, a carbon-rich material made by heating organic waste in low-oxygen conditions. A new review published in Biochar offers a comprehensive comparison of conventional pyrolysis and microwave-assisted pyrolysis, two major routes for producing biochar, and explains how the choice of heating method can shape biochar’s structure, chemistry, and pollution-removal performance.

Freshwater scarcity is one of the most urgent challenges facing sustainable development, especially as many conventional desalination technologies require high energy input and costly infrastructure. A new study published in Biochar presents a promising alternative: a hybrid solar evaporator that uses biochar-doped hydrogel to turn sunlight into vapor more efficiently while improving water transport and reducing heat loss.

A new study published in Biochar shows that the water naturally present in plant biomass is not merely a processing obstacle. Instead, it can actively shape how biomass breaks down during pyrolysis, the oxygen limited heating process used to make biochar, bio-oil, and gases.

Researchers have developed a dual-scale encapsulation strategy using nanocellulose to create high-performance composite phase change materials. The approach combines Pickering emulsion microencapsulation with aerogel scaffold embedding, achieving excellent shape stability and leakage resistance even at high loading levels.

Researchers have developed a scaffold-microenvironment decoupling strategy for chitosan-based hydrogels that architecturally separates mechanical integrity from ionic conductivity, yielding a material with high strength, ultra-high ionic conductivity of 68.6 mS/cm, and exceptional resistance to freezing below –85 °C and dehydration.

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that low-energy suspension plasma spraying can deposit and chemically modify soda lignin in a single step, producing continuous, oxidatively modified coatings without additional crosslinkers, organic solvents, or catalysts. The resulting coatings show UV-blocking and anti-fogging properties.

Skin flaps are essential in reconstructive surgery, but their success can be threatened when blood flow fails to reach the farthest tissue. 

Gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs) are primarily driven by mutations in the KIT receptor, yet many patients eventually develop resistance to existing targeted therapies. 

Success after refractive surgery is often measured by visual acuity, but patients also care about how comfortable their vision feels in daily life. Glare, halos, haze, blurred vision, and night-vision discomfort can shape the early postoperative experience even when the eye chart looks excellent. A new prospective cohort study published in Eye Discovery by researchers from the Eye and ENT Hospital of Fudan University and collaborating institutions provides a detailed early picture of both objective and subjective visual quality after keratorefractive lenticule extraction using the VISUMAX 800 platform.