Look closely at Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa, one of Japan's most iconic masterpieces. The brilliant white of the waves, the snow on Mount Fuji and the clouds above contain no white pigment. Instead, their whiteness comes from the way light scatters off the unprinted fibers of the washi paper itself. 

This optical phenomenon—known as structural whiteness—is the same mechanism that makes sea spray, snow, and clouds appear bright white in nature. Throughout nature, from plant tissues to protective frog nests, foamed structures made mostly of air scatter light with extraordinary efficiency, creating intense whiteness without the need for pigments.

This natural phenomenon inspired an international research team—led by Professor Easan Sivaniah of Kyoto University’s Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences (iCeMS), alongside collaborators from Tokyo Metropolitan University and Donghua University—to develop a new foam-based materials platform that solves two major industrial challenges in everyday materials.

Today, white packaging, films and coatings rely heavily on titanium dioxide (TiO₂) to provide brightness and opacity in creating white materials, but safety concerns recently led the European Union to ban its use as a food additive. Meanwhile, fluorinated materials known as PFAS are widely used to provide water and oil repellency, but growing concerns about their persistence and potential environmental and health impacts are driving efforts around the world to develop alternatives.

To address these challenges, the team developed a technology that generates whiteness and controls water repellency through precisely engineered porous structures that reproduce the light-scattering behavior of natural foams, drawing inspiration from natural surfaces such as leaves and flower petals. 

A University of Iowa-led chemistry team has isolated an atypical form of the rare-earth metal terbium – under normal environmental conditions. The breakthrough could make terbium and similar metals easier to separate and study, potentially expanding their use in quantum technologies, electronics, medicine, and other applications. Results published in the journal Nature Communications.

Invasive fungal infections induced by Candida species are becoming an urgent threat to global health. While a series of antifungal vaccines have been developed, their efficiency is frequently compromised by the failure of immune stimulation. In this study, a novel antifungal vaccine was constructed by assembling β-glucan with the Candida albicans antigen candidalysin on the surface of the genetically engineered Escherichia coli strain EcS. This co-assembly was mediated by the cell surface-exposed artificial glucan-binding protein CipC-mCherry-CipC, leading to the formation of the surface glucan nanofilm with a thickness of ~ 80 nm. Upon coincubation with macrophages, the vaccine efficiently escapes from the lysosomes, leading to enhanced production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and macrophage maturation. After mouse immunization, the vaccine persists longer in lymph nodes than free candidalysin or the glucan-free complex, and induces higher levels of CD4⁺, CD8⁺, TNFα⁺/CD4⁺ and IFNγ⁺/CD4⁺ T cells in the spleen. In a murine model of invasive fungal infection,immunization with this vaccine remarkably increases the survival rate, reduces the kidney fungal burdens and attenuates inflammatory responses. This bioengineering strategy offers a potentially viable approach for developing co-assembled whole-cell vaccines and can be extended to leverage bacterial carriers for surface antigen display. The vaccine acts not only as antigens but also as adjuvants, thereby eliciting strong and specific protective immunity against invasive fungal infections.