The Heineman Foundation, American Institute of Physics, and American Astronomical Society are pleased to announce Priyamvada Natarajan as the winner of the 2025 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics. Natarajan was selected for her groundbreaking contributions to advancing our understanding of dark matter substructure in galaxy clusters, the formation and fueling of black holes, and their feedback into the surrounding environment. As a theoretical physicist with an interest in dark matter and black holes, she has focused on making maps of dark matter in galaxy clusters, the largest known concentrations of dark matter.

DDT soil pollution is still a major problem in many parts of the world. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a new method to manage ecological risks from the toxin by binding it with biochar. When they mixed biochar into contaminated soil at a former tree nursery, DDT uptake by earthworms in the soil was halved. This method may enable the growing of certain crops on land that is currently considered unusable due to the environmental risks.

In a paper published in National Science Review, an international team of scientists propose a machine-learned protocol to efficiently and accurately monitor the chemical evolution processes using infrared spectroscopy descriptor. Illustrated with the example of C–C coupling in catalytic reactions, this introduces an intuitive strategy for fingerprinting chemical configurations to using them for assigning dynamic structural information via machine learning approach.

The chemical composition of a material alone sometimes reveals little about its properties. The decisive factor is often the arrangement of the molecules in the atomic lattice structure or on the surface of the material. Materials science utilises this factor to create certain properties by applying individual atoms and molecules to surfaces with the aid of high-performance microscopes. This is still extremely time-consuming and the constructed nanostructures are comparatively simple. Using artificial intelligence, a new research group at TU Graz now wants to take the construction of nanostructures to a new level: “We want to develop a self-learning AI system that positions individual molecules quickly, specifically and in the right orientation, and all this completely autonomously,” says Oliver Hofmann from the Institute of Solid State Physics, who heads the research group. This should make it possible to build highly complex molecular structures, including logic circuits in the nanometre range. The “Molecule arrangement through artificial intelligence” research group is receiving funding totalling 1.19 million euros from the Austrian Science Fund.

The temperature changes hour to hour and day to day, exchange rates behave no differently. Wherever studies of the variability of similar one-dimensional time series are concerned, analyses based on multifractals have managed to gain recognition. Now, these tools have been developed and successfully applied to two-dimensional cases, including the study of abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock.

For the first time, chemists used a drum mill to manufacture an ibuprofen formulation at a kilogram scale. This opens new pathways for sustainable, large-scale pharmaceutical production. The reaction was completed within only 90 minutes with a yield of 99%. This formulation combines ibuprofen with nicotinamide and exhibits improved therapeutic efficacy and physicochemical properties compared to ibuprofen alone.

Nonlinear Raman-Nath diffraction (NRND) is a unique diffraction pattern formed when a high-intensity laser interacts with a nonlinear microstructure bulky medium relying only on the transverse phase matching condition. Here, we report on the first experimental observation of NRND in a submicron-thick periodically poled lithium niobate thin film (PPLNTF) by geometric reflection pumped via a near-infrared femtosecond pulse laser. We further observe the evolution of the diffracted signals after broadening of the pump laser via a fused silica plate. We systematically analyze the spectral properties of multi-order second harmonic generation (SHG) diffracted signals exhibiting asymmetric distributions and explicitly clarify their phase matching conditions, simultaneously considering the impacts of the incident pump wavelength, the sample poling period, and the incident angle on the properties of the angular distribution diffracted beams. The realization of NRND phenomena with appreciable on-chip efficiency at a submicron interaction length is mainly attributed to the significant contribution of domain walls to enhance the nonlinear effects along with the modulation of second-order nonlinear susceptibilities χ(2). This NRND scheme provides a high-resolution, non-destructive on-chip microstructure diagnostic method, and even has the potential to develop novel on-chip integrated optoelectronic devices for applications such as precision metrology, biosensing, and spectral analysis.