News from Science China Press

A new study published in Science China Life Sciences reports that Buyang Huanwu Decoction, a traditional Chinese medicine formula, improved motor recovery and reduced acute inflammation in a mouse model of spinal cord injury. The study suggests that its protective effects may be linked to the suppression of microglial activation and the regulation of the complement and coagulation cascades.

Freestanding oxide membranes are promising platforms for flexible electronics, sensors, and heterogeneous device integration, but cracks and wrinkles formed during release and transfer can compromise their performance and reliability. Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China have developed a lock-in thermography-based method that converts these hidden structural imperfections into characteristic thermal signatures. The approach enables rapid, wide-area inspection of conductive oxide membranes and provides semi-quantitative information on crack size, crack orientation, and wrinkle morphology.

How do waves spread, stall, or pile up in materials that are both messy and “open”—leaking energy to their surroundings? Researchers at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences have derived a compact mathematical rule, the universal Thouless relations (UTRs), that links two seemingly separate things: how densely energy levels populate the spectrum, and how strongly waves grow or decay across the system. The relations work for a broad family of one-dimensional disordered, non-Hermitian models, predict the boundary between two kinds of wave trapping without heavy computation, and uncover a new type of “half-localized, half-fractal” critical state with no counterpart in ordinary closed systems.

Researchers developed MARVAL, an automated platform for measuring the shape of brain blood vessels from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography. In more than 3,000 community participants and nearly 9,000 stroke patients with high-quality imaging, the team built an East Asian cerebrovascular template, charted age-related vascular changes, and found that small-vessel integrity and network complexity were strongly associated with disability, recurrence and mortality after ischemic stroke.

CardioNVT is an end-to-end deep learning platform for rapid, immunostaining-free assessment of cardiomyocyte nuclear ploidy in situ. Using only DAPI-stained heart sections, it segments cardiomyocyte nuclei, tracks them across z-stack planes, reconstructs 3D nuclear volumes, and infers ploidy from volume measurements, enabling scalable studies of cardiac development, remodeling, and repair.

A new study in Science Bulletin presents DVSTP, a deep learning system that integrates pathology images with spatial transcriptomics and proteomics to map intra-tumor heterogeneity. DVSTP predicts molecular profiles from routine pathology slides, making spatial multi-omics more accessible. Whole–tumor 3D reconstruction reveals that SRSF6 drives immune exclusion and is associated with poor clinical outcomes.

Within the neurovascular unit, neurons, glial cells, brain microvascular endothelial cells, and pericytes all harbor mitochondria. When these organelles become dysfunctional, they drive and amplify neuroinflammation in various ways. A new review in Science Bulletin provides a systematic framework for summarizing nanomedicines that can precisely target damaged mitochondria, revealing a promising strategy for the treatment of central nervous system diseases.

Researchers led by Professor Maochang Liu at Xi’an Jiaotong University have developed a photocatalytic system that simultaneously produces hydrogen gas and a valuable industrial chemical from ethanol with 100% selectivity. By anchoring Ru single atoms and creating S vacancies on ultrathin porous CdS nanosheets, the team achieved an 81.5-fold enhancement in hydrogen evolution compared to pristine CdS. The work, published in Science Bulletin, provides a new strategy for solar-driven coproduction of clean fuel and high-value chemicals.