Urban green spaces such as parks, gardens, and residential lawns play an essential role in supporting biodiversity, storing carbon, and improving human well-being. However, rapid urbanization is degrading these soils, reducing their fertility and disrupting natural nutrient cycles. A new study reveals that combining biochar and compost can restore soil health, but only under the right conditions, and fungi play a decisive role in determining success.

A new study demonstrates that agricultural waste can be transformed into a powerful, eco-friendly catalyst that dramatically improves the removal of stubborn chemical pollutants from water. Researchers developed a nitrogen-doped biochar made from cotton hulls that enhances ozone-based water treatment efficiency by more than 100 times, offering a promising solution for tackling emerging contaminants.

A five-year field study reveals that biochar can do far more than improve soil chemistry. It can reorganize entire soil ecosystems, creating lasting benefits for agriculture and environmental sustainability.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo developed pump-field-probe fluorescence microscopy, a new method that reveals short-lived, magnetically sensitive biomolecular intermediates that do not emit light directly. The platform enables nanosecond scale tracking of spin-dependent reaction dynamics and supports future applications in quantum biology and biomedically relevant magnetic-field research.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville professor and Goodrich Chair of Excellence in Civil Engineering Frank Loeffler and his coauthors published new research on the environmental impacts of “forever chemicals” in Nature Microbiology last week.

Quantum mechanics tells us that a particle can never be perfectly still. But how precisely can it be oriented? A research team at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues at TU Wien and Ulm University, has now cooled the rotational motion of a levitated silica nanorotor all the way to its quantum ground state - in two orientational degrees of freedom. Reporting in Nature Physics, they show how optical cooling confines the nanoparticle's orientation to within the bounds of quantum zero-point fluctuations, the unavoidable orientational uncertainty imposed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. Such quantum-limited alignment is an important milestone towards rotational matter-wave interferometry and ultra-sensitive quantum torque sensing.

Scientists have found a new way to detect subtle chemical signatures in seawater—revealing previously invisible details about the ocean’s chemistry from data continuously collected by thousands of autonomous robotic floats drifting across the seas.

A new review gives a comprehensive overview of natural photosynthesis; the principles and history of artificial photosynthesis research; and carbon dioxide capture, utilization, and storage technologies.