Researchers from Nankai University developed a urea‑modified covalent organic framework (urea‑COF) via linker‑editing strategy. Ordered hydrogen‑bond networks inside COF pores serve as proton highways, accelerating Grotthuss proton transfer and overcoming the sluggish water‑oxidation bottleneck. The urea‑COF achieves a high H₂O₂ production rate of 4104 μmol g⁻¹ h⁻¹, 2.8‑fold higher than imine‑COF. A buoyant tri‑phase hydrogel‑bead reactor was further constructed for in‑situ water disinfection. Techno‑economic analysis shows a competitive levelized cost of 14.6 USD kg⁻¹ for distributed solar‑powered water treatment.

POSTECH–KAIST team captures molecular moments on a 100-picosecond timescale using time-resolved X-rays, revealing radical positions and motion

Researchers at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) have succeeded in controlling the magnetism in the nucleus of a single atom with radio waves. This came as a surprise: until now, physicists believed that this nuclear spin could not be manipulated directly. The discovery could open up new possibilities for storing and reading quantum information. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications.

University of Missouri researchers have created rice plants that resist bacterial blight, a devastating disease that threatens one of the world’s most important food crops.

A Maryland-led team has won a $7.5 million MURI award from the Department of Defense to investigate how shaping intense laser pulses in space and time can open new ways to control matter.

Photocatalysts tend to become less efficient at low reactant concentrations, as the probability of reacting molecules getting close to photocatalytic sites decreases. Now, researchers have developed a novel photocatalyst by pairing a positively charged ruthenium complex with an acidic counteranion called BBcat. This anion selectively captures basic molecules and brings them close to the catalyst, enabling high reaction yields under dilute conditions, offering a new strategy for selective photochemical synthesis.

Molecules are never still. Driven by thermal energy, they are constantly moving through space, while their individual parts also rotate relative to one another. Scientists at IOCB Prague have now shown that random motion within a molecule can be dramatically suppressed. Using light, they can slow down the relative rotation of two different parts of a single molecule by up to five orders of magnitude, paving the way for more complex molecular machines.