Though scientists have long understood how lightning strikes, the precise atmospheric events that trigger it within thunderclouds remained a perplexing mystery. The mystery may be solved, thanks to a team of researchers led by Victor Pasko, professor of electrical engineering in the Penn State School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, that has revealed the powerful chain reaction that triggers lightning.

Light-on-light scattering is an exotic process with surprising significance for particle physics. Researchers at TU Wien have shown that a previously underestimated effect plays an important role in this process.

Template-assisted synthesis dramatically improves the yield of functionalized oligophenylene cages, report researchers from Japan. By using covalent templates to guide a six-fold Suzuki–Miyaura cross-coupling reaction, the researchers achieved significantly higher yields of around 68% in comparison to conventional methods, which struggle to exceed a 10% yield. The resulting molecular cages feature tailored cavities with inward-facing OH and NH₂ groups for selective molecular encapsulation—opening new avenues for host-guest chemistry and catalysis.

In IJEM, a new method for the production of high specific strength SiC-based ceramics at a relatively low sintering temperature (1100 °C) is proposed. Low-temperature sintering of SiC-based ceramics can be achieved by introducing a high content of polysiloxane (PSO) solution (75% by weight). At the same time, the introduction of silicon oxidized carbon (SiOC) phase greatly reduces the anisotropy in the mechanical properties of SiC ceramics. This method provides insights for forming SiC-based ceramics by low-temperature primary sintering and provides a new reference for controlling the anisotropy of vat polymerization ceramic parts.

A team of researchers at the Max Born Institute and collaborating institutions has developed a reliable method to create complex magnetic textures, known as skyrmion bags, in thin ferromagnetic films. Skyrmion bags are donut-like, topologically rich spin textures that go beyond the widely studied single skyrmions.

Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan have developed a lipid nanoparticle that delivers mRNA to cells five times more effectively. By attaching a sulfur-containing ring structure—a cyclic disulfide—to lipid molecules, they found that significantly more mRNA can escape from cell components that normally destroy genetic material. When tested as a cancer vaccine in mice, the new delivery system stopped tumor growth. The study, published in the journal RSC Medicinal Chemistry, demonstrates the first successful use of cyclic disulfide-containing lipids to improve mRNA delivery in animals and suppress tumor growth.

A research group led by Prof. DING Weixin from the Institute of Soil Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has utilized a newly developed dynamic global wetland water level (WL) dataset to assess the spatiotemporal dynamics of wetland carbon sequestration from 2000 to 2020.