A nut used in herbal tea has become a hydrogel perfect for a variety of biomedical uses in new research from the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Engineering (UChicago PME) and UChicago Chemistry Department. A paper published today in Matter created a malva nut hydrogel for medical uses ranging from wound care to ECG readings. The research doesn’t rely on the rumored health benefits of the nuts – in China, they’re known as the sore throat remedy Pangdahai (PDH) – but for their ability to swell 20 times their weight in water.

Called the Lévy walk (or in some cases the Lévy flight) after mathematician Paul Lévy, it is a type of random wandering that occurs in nature in a wide variety of ways, from predators searching for food to economic, microbiological, chemical processes to climate change. In their latest research, Dániel Kincses, Márton Nagy and Máté Csanád, researchers from the Department of Atomic Physics and the Astro- and Particle Physics Programme of Excellence (TKP) at ELTE, have shown that the motion of particles in high-energy nuclear collisions can also be described as Lévy walks, confirming the interdisciplinary nature of the phenomenon.

When it comes to layered quantum materials, current understanding only scratches the surface; so demonstrates a new study from the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI. Using advanced X-ray spectroscopy at the Swiss Light Source SLS, researchers uncovered magnetic phenomena driven by unexpected interactions between the layers of a kagome ferromagnet made from iron and tin. This discovery challenges assumptions about layered alloys of common metals, providing a starting point for developing new magnetoelectric devices and rare-earth-free motors.

The "needle in the haystack" discovery of a powerful explosion from a mysterious unknown object outside our galaxy has excited astronomers. It went unnoticed for years within a vast, two decade-long archive of observations by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, before being unearthed by a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Astronomers led by Stanford University and Harvard believe the "remarkable" cosmic explosion could either be the first X-ray burster ever discovered in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), a rare flare from a magnetar – one of the most mysterious objects in the universe – or something entirely new and unheard of.

In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists found a significant decline of downward surface solar radiation (DSSR) from 1959 to 2014. Greenhouse gases (GHGs) and anthropogenic aerosols contributed equally to the weakening of the DSSR and the role of GHGs was more significant after 1979. Whether DSSR would continue to decrease in the future is highly dependent on emission policies. The implementation of relatively lower aerosols and CO₂ emissions will help to curb the weakening of DSSR and provide a key guarantee for a smooth transition from traditional fossil energy sources to a cleaner one.