MIT Energy Initiative researchers calculated the economic and environmental impact of future ammonia energy production and trade pathways.

Thyme can provide anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial, antioxidant, and immune benefits, but the extract vaporizes quickly and too much can be irritating, so researchers have developed a method to encapsulate nanodroplets of thyme extract within another fluid. They create a solution of thyme extract and gelatin and then push this through a tiny chip simultaneously with a jet of sodium alginate. The chip focuses the two fluids into a single flow and then a jet of oil breaks the multicomponent fluid apart into tiny, encapsulated droplets.

At times the sun ejects energetic material into space which can have consequences for space-based and even ground-based electronic technology. Researchers aim to understand this phenomenon and find ways to forecast it, including how ejected material evolves as it travels through the solar system. For the first time, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, made high-quality measurements of an evolving cloud of solar ejecta by using multiple space-based instruments which were not designed to do so, and observed the way the clouds reduce background cosmic-ray activity.

A key challenge in parallel adaptive Cartesian grid generation is significant computational load imbalance during k‑d tree searches. A new Dynamic Partition Weight approach, published in the Chinese Journal of Aeronautics (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cja.2025.103921), solves this by predicting each cell’s required k‑d tree iterations and performing intelligent load rebalancing. This method enables the generation of billion‑cell grids for complex aircraft models in less than a minute, offering a breakthrough for high‑fidelity CFD simulations.

Researchers from the Optics Group at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón have managed to correct in real time problems related to image aberrations in single-pixel microscopy using a recent technology: programmable deformable lenses. The new method was described by the research team in an open-access article recently published in Nature Communications and is part of the development of the European CONcISE project.

The solution proposed by this team combines an adaptive lens (which “shapes” the light wavefront in real time) with a sensor-less method that evaluates image sharpness directly from the data, without complex algorithms. This approach corrects distortions caused both by the system and by the sample itself, producing sharper images, close to the physical resolution limit, without adding complexity to the microscope.

This adaptive lens is known as a “multi-actuator adaptive lens” (M-AL), which can be easily integrated into the system without significantly modifying the traditional configuration of a single-pixel microscope based on structured illumination. These types of lenses consist of an optically transparent and deformable membrane (similar to a thin sheet of glass or polymer) that can change shape via actuators distributed around or behind it.