Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and Southern Methodist University (SMU) are collaborating to advance solid-state battery technology. Solid-state batteries are safer, longer-lasting, and more efficient alternatives to traditional lithium-ion batteries, offering faster charging and greater energy storage potential. They are especially promising for powering electric vehicles, but current designs are held back by electrodes and interfaces that degrade over time. SwRI and SMU will address this bottleneck and work together to develop a more stable solid-state battery design architecture. 

Progress in chemistry is often gradual, with some of its most important advances taking years – sometimes decades – to unfold. A case in point is the discovery of a novel ‘ferrocenophane’ from the class of compounds known as ‘sandwich molecules’ – so named because of their particular structure. In a ferrocenophane, the ‘bread slices’ are two carbon rings that enclose an iron atom as the sandwich ‘filling’. A team of chemists at Saarland University has now succeeded in developing a highly unusual bent sandwich molecule that opens up new possibilities for designing iron-containing materials.

Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) provides new insights into oxygen vacancy oscillation modes in amorphous zirconia films. Researchers from Xidian University, the Beijing Academy of Quantum Information Sciences, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology used THz-TDS along with infrared spectroscopy and first-principles calculations to demonstrate that oxygen-vacancy migration play a key role in ionic conductivity and ferroelectric-like behavior

Reactive Black 5 is a widely used textile dye that is difficult to degrade and commonly found in industrial wastewater. Researchers investigated the treatment potential of a constructed wetland-derived Clostridium sp. strain T4 by combining metabolite identification with ecotoxicological assessment. Although the bacterium removed up to 97% of the dye, toxic aromatic amines accumulated during treatment, increasing aquatic toxicity and demonstrating that decolorization does not necessarily mean detoxification.

Aalto University researchers have demonstrated the first cyclic quantum heat engine inside a superconducting circuit.

Flat optics can shape light with ultrathin nanostructures, but single-layer devices are often limited by fixed in-plane designs. In a new Review, scientists summarize how stacking two or more nonlocal flat-optical layers introduces new interlayer degrees of freedom, including spacing, translation, twist, and lattice mismatch. These knobs enable tunable resonances, high-Q states, moiré flat bands, optical vortices, beam steering, chirality, and programmable nonlinear emission.

A research team led by Profs. SHEN Renfang and ZHU Xiaofang from the Institute of Soil Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has demonstrated that drought and abscisic acid (ABA) signaling actively trigger excessive Cd uptake in rice under water-saving regimes.

The rapid evolution of modern warfare toward distributed, intelligent, and global stealth has posed severe energy supply and information perception bottlenecks for combat nodes. Traditional energy supply strategies are unable to meet the strategic needs of long-range stealth operations and extreme environmental survival. Triboelectric nanogenerators provide a disruptive path for constructing self-sustaining military microsystems with high-efficiency and zero-power-sensing characteristics. This review establishes a comprehensive framework that systematically evaluates recent technological advances across an escalating hierarchy, encompassing individual soldier combat platforms, unmanned combat systems, strategic aerospace equipment, and special tactical scenarios. Crucially, moving beyond generic laboratory demonstrations, this review adopts a rigorous defense engineering perspective by conducting an integrated failure mode analysis to evaluate device degradation under severe battlefield stressors. Furthermore, it critically analyzes the primary engineering bottlenecks currently hindering military adoption, such as inherent impedance mismatch and scalable manufacturing barriers, and proposes targeted mitigation strategies. To systematically validate these solutions, we explicitly propose a concise evaluation framework strictly aligned with established military testing protocols. Ultimately, this review outlines several forward-looking strategic priorities, thereby constructing a highly actionable roadmap to accelerate the practical deployment of self-driven intelligent technologies.