Advanced quantum detectors designed at Texas A&M University are reinventing the search for dark matter, an unseen force that science has yet to explain.

A Rice University-led team has unveiled how tiny molecular structures on industrial catalysts behave during the manufacture of vinyl acetate monomer (VAM), a core ingredient in adhesives, paints, coatings, packaging, textiles and many other products people use every day. By revealing how these molecular palladium-acetate trimers and dimers transform under reaction conditions and control catalyst performance, the work points the way to catalyst designs that could cut energy use, reduce carbon emissions and make global VAM production cleaner and more reliable.

The complex fluid–structure interaction underlying blood flow through vessels has proved challenging to analyze both numerically and experimentally. Addressing this gap, researchers developed a new experimental platform that uses polarized light to directly visualize stress fields in artificial blood vessels and in the flowing blood analogue in real time. Their findings reveal how stress is distributed during pulsating flow and could help design safer devices and improve the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular diseases.

A way to electrically modify the chirality of organic–inorganic hybrid materials, in which chiral molecules adsorb onto inorganic surfaces, has been demonstrated by researchers at Science Tokyo. By using an electric double-layer transistor with a chiral electrolyte, specific chirality was imposed on an otherwise achiral molybdenum disulfide surface. This reversible method enables tunable chiral electronic states and opens new possibilities for advanced spintronic devices and the emerging field of “chiral iontronics.”