A new study has yielded clues about when dormant microscopic bacteria and fungi in soil "wake up" and colonize roots, which influences plant growth and health.

Halide perovskites is a recently emerged platform for the creation of efficient memristors. In turn, single-crystal inorganic perovskite would be new low-cost and flexible memory devices because of their excellent resistive switching (RS) properties, without risk of chemical and mechanical stress-generated degradation, compared with the operational instability of general thin-film perovskite memristors. Moreover, miniaturization of perovskite memristors would be useful for creating high-density memory devices.

Air pollution is a major environmental challenge of this century. In a recent Journal of Environmental Sciences review paper, scientists from the Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, have highlighted potential technologies for direct purification of air pollutants in the environment, including photocatalysis and ambient non-photocatalytic approaches. They also propose the novel concept of an ‘Environmental Catalytic City.’

Silver iodide is the material of choice to make clouds release rain and snow. For decades, its remarkable ability to trigger precipitation has been used in cloud seeding to prevent hail damage and mitigate droughts. Now, for the first time, researchers at TU Wien have revealed in atomic detail how this process works.

An international research team has published a pioneering study in Nature Sustainability unveiling the hidden water footprint of materials such as steel, cement, paper, plastics, and rubber. The findings highlight alarming growth in freshwater consumption tied to industrial production, raising urgent sustainability concerns for water-stressed countries.