A research team from the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGCAS), together with collaborators, used complementary molecular dynamics simulations, combining ab initio and deep-learning potential methods. Their findings, published in Science Advances on January 28, reveal that under deep lower mantle and core–mantle boundary (CMB) conditions, water and the key hydrous mineral δ-AlOOH enter a superionic state—which combines features of a solid crystal lattice with liquid-like mobile ions—thereby fundamentally altering their stability and dehydration behavior.

A third of fish living in the remote coastal waters of the Pacific Island Countries and Territories are contaminated with microplastics, with especially high rates in Fiji, according to an analysis publishing January 28, 2026 in the open-access journal PLOS One by Jasha Dehm at the University of the South Pacific and colleagues.

While paleontologists have uncovered dozens of such Cambrian soft-bodied fossil sites—including China's early Cambrian Chengjiang biota in Yunnan and Canada's middle Cambrian Burgess Shale biota, the most famous examples of their kind—no equivalent top-tier soft-bodied fossil deposit had ever been found from the critical post-Sinsk Event time interval.

That changed over the past five years, however, with the discovery of the Huayuan biota—a world-class soft-bodied fossil deposit dating to shortly after the Sinsk Event. The deposit, located in Huayuan County, Hunan Province, was identified by a research team from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), whose findings were published in Nature on January 28.

Large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet is irreversible and happening at a rapid rate, and now a new international study is the first to understand why. 

A University of Waterloo scientist and a team of international collaborators found that airborne mineral dust and other aerosols are directly connected to how much algae grows on the ice. The algae interfere with albedo, or the reflection of the sun’s rays, exacerbating melting.   

MPI-GEA researchers are part of a long-term collaborative ethnographic framework applying isotope analysis to human hair to study how pastoralist diets in eastern Africa adapt to rainfall variation in increasingly extreme 21^st century conditions.