Virtual fences could make managing grazing livestock on farms more flexible and more efficient whilst improving animal welfare. A new study by the University of Göttingen shows that virtual fences trigger similar behaviour in cattle, in terms of how they move around in the field, to conventional electric fences. This finding clearly puts the concerns, which are commonly expressed about animal welfare, into perspective. The results were published in the journal Animal.

Understanding nanoparticle morphology is essential for elucidating their physical behavior and functional performance. Such morphological characterization of nanoparticles is important for understanding structure–function relationships in colloidal and bionano systems. Here, we present a deep-learning-based framework that enables nanoparticle morphology classification from standard nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) data by integrating features derived from single-particle Brownian-motion trajectories and temporal fluctuations in scattered-light intensity. The combined feature representation consistently improved binary (two-category) classification performance across all particle-type combinations, reducing the low-accuracy cases observed in single-feature models and achieving accuracies exceeding 0.82 with 100-frame data. For three-class classification, the per-class correctness averaged approximately 80%. The integrated approach maintained stable performance even with limited particle counts or short data lengths (down to ∼20 frames), underscoring its robustness for practical scenarios such as biomedical diagnostics, rare-material analysis, and environmental nanoparticle monitoring. These capabilities highlight its practical relevance for applications such as extracellular vesicle characterization and nanomedicine quality control. By integrating complementary trajectory- and scattering-intensity-based descriptors, this framework offers a reliable and practical route to scalable, morphology-resolved nanoparticle analysis in liquid media using standard NTA measurements.

Colorless carotenoids have attracted growing interest as naturally derived ingredients for food and cosmetic applications, but their individual geometric isomers have remained difficult to isolate and study. Researchers have now purified high-purity phytoene and phytofluene isomers and comprehensively characterized their structures, ultraviolet absorption, antioxidant properties, isomerization behavior, and skin-related biological activities. Their findings reveal multifunctional properties that may support next-generation skincare, nutricosmetics, and healthy aging products across the food, cosmetic, healthcare, and wellness industries.

POSTECH research team led by Prof. Jongmin Kim develops 'RATEX,' an RNA circuit capable of complex computation inside living cells.