Heatwaves are arriving sooner and becoming hotter, with the United Kingdom recording May 25 as its hottest day in May since tracking began more than a century ago, only for the record to break again the next day. While humans can turn to artificial means of cooling, such as air conditioning or swimming pools, plants are left to cope with heat and frequently co-occurring droughts on their own. Sarah M. Assmann, Waller Professor of Biology at Penn State, is working to better understand how plants respond to environmental signals — and is applying that understanding to develop crops more resilient to environmental stress.

Discovering new catalysts to power hydrogen production often involves a time-consuming trial-and-error process. Not only that, but materials scientists often have to comb through troves of scientific data and experimental data. Yet these days may be over thanks to a new AI-powered platform that enables researchers to identify new catalysts for methane pyrolysis— a promising technology for producing hydrogen with lower carbon emissions.

Nylon‑6,6 is widely used but hard to recycle, and most waste ends up in landfills. A new study in Engineering introduces an eco‑friendly way to break down nylon‑6,6 using iron‑based Lewis/Brønsted acidic deep eutectic solvents at 180 °C for 5 h. It efficiently recovers monomers with high yield, works for both new and used nylon products, and shows competitive environmental performance, offering a practical path for circular polymer recycling.

A research team led by Professor Taesung Kim of the School of Mechanical Engineering at SKKU developed an optoelectronic synaptic device that mimics the functions of human neurons and synapses at the device scale.

While Reno families were celebrating the 1997 New Year, the Truckee River was surging into the city’s downtown streets. A rainstorm was falling on the Sierra Nevada’s deep snowpack, melting it rapidly and creating a hazardous situation for downstream communities. Rain-on-snow storms like this one have been challenging for emergency managers to forecast and prepare for due to limited understanding about how the snowpack responds to rain. A new tool directly addresses this problem by utilizing hourly soil moisture data from the SNOwpack TELemetry Network (SNOTEL) to provide insight into how the snowpack is responding to a storm in near real-time. 

In a new study, an Iowa State researcher upends the idea that AI simplifies writing, showing instead that it raises the cognitive stakes for students. The study identifies three key thresholds that reveal why using AI well takes more judgment, experimentation and agency than many students expect.