When oily plastic and glass, as well as rubber, washed onto Florida beaches in 2020, a community group shared the mystery online, attracting scientists’ attention. Working together, they linked the black residue-coated debris to a 2019 oil slick along Brazil’s coastline. Using ocean current models and chemical analysis, the team explains in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology how some of the oily material managed to travel over 5,200 miles (8,500 kilometers) by clinging to debris.

Oxygen isotopes data enable researchers to look far back into the geologic past and reconstruct the climate of the past. In doing so, they consider several factors such as ocean temperature and ice volume in polar regions. A new publication, by an international team from Bergen (Norway) and Bremen in Nature Geoscience concludes that the Antarctic ice sheet was less dynamic during the Oligocene epoch 34 to 23 million years ago than previously assumed.

Cells have a remarkable housekeeping system: proteins that are no longer needed, defective, or potentially harmful are labeled with a molecular “tag” and dismantled in the cellular recycling machinery. This process, known as the ubiquitin-proteasome system, is crucial for health and survival. Now, an international team of scientists led by CeMM, AITHYRA and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Dortmund has identified a new class of small molecules that harness this natural system to accelerate the removal of an immune-modulating enzyme called IDO1. The findings, published in Nature Chemistry (DOI: 10.1038/s41557-025-02021-5), introduce a new concept in drug discovery that could transform how we target difficult proteins in cancer and beyond.

Researchers led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore have, for the first time, recorded a tiny mechanical “twitch” in rod photoreceptors in living human and animal eyes at the moment they detect light. The finding reveals a fundamental mechanism underlying night vision and could enable new, non-invasive ways to assess retinal health. Rod cells are essential for low-light vision and are often the first affected in age-related retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration, which affects an estimated 200 million people worldwide. Current clinical tests for rod function are limited and often subjective. The new approach could lead to objective tools to assess night vision, monitor decline over time and support earlier medical intervention, with further clinical studies planned in Singapore.

Researchers from the Department of Precision Instruments at Tsinghua University have developed a novel model-based deep learning framework that significantly enhances the temporal resolution of computational microscopy. By training a neural network that learns the inherent spatiotemporal correlations in dynamic processes, the team achieved high-fidelity, time-resolved imaging of live biological samples, pushing the boundaries of label-free microscopy. The progress is published in the journal PhotoniX.

Scientists at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI have, for the first time, demonstrated a technique that synchronises ultrashort X-ray pulses at the X-ray free-electron laser SwissFEL. This achievement opens new possibilities for observing ultrafast atomic and molecular processes with attosecond precision.

Researchers have created a spray-on polyurea nanocomposite coating reinforced with functionalized graphene. The coating delivers high strength and stretchability, strong adhesion across substrates, and durable performance after heat, salt-spray, and UV aging. It also resists corrosion and provides fast, reliable strain sensing for real-time damage detection—offering a scalable protective coating for infrastructure and automotive structures.

A research team led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have presented a new way to produce hydrogen gas without the scarce and expensive metal platinum. Using sunlight, water and tiny particles of electrically conductive plastic, the researchers show how the hydrogen can be produced efficiently, sustainably and at low cost.