Scientists in Sweden have taken an important step toward fighting potato late blight, a plant disease that once triggered an historic famine in Ireland and now threatens to spread globally due to climate change. 

A new study reports the synthesis of a peptide that specifically attacks Phytophthora infestans (P. infestans) to protect potato and tomato crops—without harm to other plants. The work was carried out by researchers at Stockholm’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology, in collaboration with research partners in Italy, India and Australia.

Researchers at The University of Osaka have developed a catalyst that uses vibrational energy to convert carbon dioxide (CO₂) into carbon monoxide (CO), an important industrial feedstock. The work demonstrates a new piezocatalytic route for CO₂ conversion at low temperature and ambient pressure, offering a potential path toward future low-energy carbon recycling technologies.

Researchers have developed a MOF-derived hollow polyhedral Co₉S₈/Ag₂S heterojunction that traps light like a magic cage. The design combines nanoconfinement effects with a built-in electric field acts as a traffic cop, directing electrons to flow directionally and enabling efficient charge separation. This nanoconfinement design achieves 99.3% antibiotic degradation in 30 minutes and remains stable over multiple cycles.

Peatlands store vast amounts of carbon, but when drained for agriculture, they can become powerful sources of greenhouse gases. A new two year study shows that combining moderate water table management with biochar application can significantly reduce emissions, offering a promising strategy for climate mitigation.

Wiley announces the release of additional data to its IR and Raman spectral libraries, significantly broadening compound coverage, including materials, polymers, minerals and others.

The simple magnet could hold the key to more effecient ways to extract rare earth elements that are critical to modern technologies, a recent study found. 

Synthetic voices are increasingly a part of our lives, and with the expansion of generative AI, a new type of synthetic voice has been developed: voice clones, which can recreate a facsimile of a person’s voice from only a few seconds of recorded speech. In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, a pair of researchers found that voice clones are easier than humans to understand in noisy environments.

Cultural patterns have an extensive range of structures, so, inspired by cultural geometries, researchers from the University of Edinburgh created and tested metamaterials comprised of Chinese characters. They published their results in The Journal of Applied Physics, by AIP Publishing. The characters with horizontal strokes distributed the load across their neighbors, demonstrating the effectiveness of crossbeams in stabilizing the material and delaying failure.

Published in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, this study introduces a revolutionary mechanochemical strategy that challenges conventional material synthesis paradigms. The research demonstrates that water, when combined with mechanical grinding, can activate sodium methylsilicate to generate reactive hydroxyl groups, enabling condensation with over 40 different substrates ranging from natural macromolecules to metal compounds. The resulting hydrophobic porous materials exhibit exceptional properties including surface areas of 129–388 m2/g, yields of 66%–90%, and remarkable versatility in environmental applications. Notably, the system can directly utilize untreated plant tissues and atmospheric CO2, converting the greenhouse gas into valuable sodium bicarbonate byproducts. The materials demonstrate outstanding performance in oil-water separation with petroleum ether permeability exceeding 801 L/(m2 h), propofol medical waste adsorption rates above 85%, and dye degradation efficiencies reaching 99.99% for pollutants including Rhodamine B, Congo red, and Nile red. This work establishes a generalizable platform for sustainable material manufacturing that aligns with green chemistry principles, requiring no heating, organic solvents, or harmful catalysts while maximizing the utilization of naturally abundant renewable resources.