A new soil-moisture retrieval strategy has improved the accuracy of satellite-based moisture mapping by combining microwave reflection signals with vegetation-structure information that conventional indices often miss.

– California condors are behaving more “wild,” feeding far less on lead-free carcasses provided to them. Nearly three decades of monitoring data show the birds venturing farther from release sites, into areas where lead-bullet bans and public education may not be as strong.

– More wild-pig hunting may be contributing to rising lead exposure. As wild-pig numbers increase and more are shot, condors may feed on abandoned carcasses containing bullet fragments. Just one contaminated meal can be lethal to a condor.

– Lead poisoning remains the top killer, underscoring the need for continued protections. In the central and southern flocks, lead poisoning accounts for 62% and 44% of deaths. 

– Using long-term data to account for changes in condor behavior, pig hunting, and other factors that contribute to lead exposure, the study concluded that outreach and lead ammunition bans reduced lead levels in condors. Without sustained outreach and enforcement, hard-won gains in the recovery effort could stall or reverse.

Physicists at Utrecht University have created a glass-like material that exists in thermodynamic equilibrium, challenging the long-held view that glass is inherently an out-of-equilibrium state. Using rod-shaped colloidal particles, the researchers observed a disordered, glassy structure in which particles remain positionally frozen but can still rotate. This state is energetically stable: even when an external electric field temporarily drives the system into an ordered crystal, it spontaneously returns to the glass-like phase once the field is removed. Computer simulations confirm the finding, showing that at higher densities the disordered state can be more stable than a crystal. The results suggest that particle shape and rotational motion play a key role in the glass transition, and could help improve predictions of material properties in applications ranging from batteries to biomaterials.

Magnetic interactions alone can generate friction — and even make it peak, as physicists at the University of Konstanz prove

Sea ice around Antarctica expanded for several decades until a dramatic decline in 2015. The reasons behind this are revealed by research from the University of Gothenburg.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Dexin Ye from Zhejiang University, Prof. Yu Luo from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Prof. Jingjing Zhang from Southeast University addressed a pivotal challenge in the field of transformation optics (TO). By synergizing the Brewster-effect with Fabry-Pérot resonances, the team successfully overcame the fundamental conflict between bandwidth and geometric complexity in TO devices, thereby overcoming the persistent bandwidth limitations that have hindered practical implementations of this transformative technology. This work has been published in National Science Review, entitled "Breaking Bandwidth Limits in Transformation Optics with Brewster-Enhanced Metamaterials," with Dr. Xiaojun Hu from Zhejiang University as the first author, Prof. Yu Luo, Prof. Jingjing Zhang and Prof. Dexin Ye as corresponding authors.

Researchers from City University of Hong Kong, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed an artificial intelligence-driven workflow called AAPSI (AI-Accelerated PhotoSensitizer Innovation) that integrates expert knowledge, scaffold-based molecule generation, and Bayesian optimization to accelerate the discovery of novel photosensitizers for photodynamic therapy (PDT). Through this workflow, the team generated 6,148 candidate molecules and experimentally validated a hypocrellin-based compound, HB4Ph, which achieves a singlet oxygen quantum yield (ϕ_Δ) of 0.85 and absorption maxima (λ_max) of 645 nm — outperforming all clinical and trial-stage photosensitizers. The work is published in AI for Science .

A paper titled "Tip-enhanced sum frequency generation spectroscopy using temporally asymmetric pulse for detecting weak vibrational signals," published on February 19, 2026 by a research team from the Institute for Molecular Science (Atsunori Sakurai, Shota Takahashi, Tatsuto Mochizuki, and Toshiki Sugimoto) and Tohoku University (Tomonori Hirano and Akihiro Morita), has been selected as a "Featured Article" in The Journal of Chemical Physics, published by the American Institute of Physics (AIP), in recognition of its particularly noteworthy research.

The paper is available at the following URL: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article/164/7/074202/3380428/Tip-enhanced-sum-frequency-generation-spectroscopy