Plastic might be the last ingredient you would ever add to a cookie recipe. But a team of researchers is looking to change that. They’ve programmed yeasts to turn plastic and agricultural waste into edible proteins and flavoring molecules, creating a treat from trash. The technology not only offers a new upcycling method, but could also sustain life in disaster zones or manned deep-space missions. The researchers will present their results at ACS Fall 2026.

In the animal kingdom, energy conservation is essential for survival. That’s why our brains have evolved to be extremely energy and resource efficient at storing and processing information. Since the 1980s, computational scientists have tried to mimic brain structure and function, but have not yet succeeded in creating functional, low-memory solutions that work in real-world scenarios. Published in Neuromorphic Computing & Engineering, a new fly brain-inspired algorithm developed by researchers at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) demonstrates promise for achieving practical applications under realistic constraints. 

A research team at Kumamoto University has developed a new blood-based approach that could help detect breast cancer recurrence by looking beyond conventional genetic mutations and examining how DNA is packaged inside cells.

STMicroelectronics and the National University of Singapore officially launched the ST–NUS HELIX Corporate Lab on 24 August 2026. This is a four-year strategic research initiative focused on advancing the next generation of edge AI technologies. HELIX, which stands for Hardware for Embodied Low-power Intelligent Xcceleration, will enable new generative and embodied AI use cases at the edge through system-to-silicon innovation.

OUS students developed a hands-on supply chain workshop using LEGO bricks to introduce high school students to Toyota’s Lean concepts, including Kanban, Kaizen, and waste reduction. Through a competitive manufacturing simulation, participants experienced how reducing inventory, improving communication, and responding to demand can increase supply chain efficiency. The workshop also gave OUS students an opportunity to translate business theory into an engaging learning experience for the next generation.

Plasma bubbles in the ionosphere over equatorial and low-latitude regions are a common nighttime plasma density depletion structure that can cause severe scintillation interference on high-frequency communications, making them an important target of space weather monitoring. Traditional detection methods rely on statistical thresholds derived from temporal fluctuations in ion density; however, plasma bubbles exhibit significant variability in spatiotemporal scales (ranging from kilometers to hundreds of kilometers), and their occurrence frequency is strongly modulated by solar activity and seasonal factors. Consequently, fixed-threshold methods struggle to accommodate this diversity, with miss rates reaching up to 40% during periods of low solar activity. Although deep learning has demonstrated powerful capabilities in automatically extracting and recognizing complex waveform features in fields such as medical image segmentation and signal peak detection, its systematic application to ionospheric plasma bubble detection—and thus addressing the adaptability deficiencies of traditional threshold methods—remains underexplored.

In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, a team of researchers conducted a series of CESM2 ensemble simulations under SSP2-4.5 to examine the impact of marine cloud brightening (MCB) on terrestrial drought. By injecting sea salt aerosols over certain subtropical ocean regions, they found that MCB could produce about 0.9°C global cooling and mitigate global land drying trend via reduced potential evapotranspiration by 2100 relative to that of SSP2-4.5. However, regional differences in drought response to MCB are evident, indicating the underlying complexity of terrestrial hydrological responses to artificial climate intervention. It sheds new light on the potential and risks of solar geoengineering for drought mitigation.