A new study published in Engineering offers insights into how global land surface soil organic carbon (SOC) levels are being influenced by climate change. The research explores historical trends and projects future changes in SOC, highlighting the complex interplay of climate factors and vegetation cover. While the findings indicate an overall increase in SOC, they also underscore the limitations of relying solely on natural carbon sinks to meet global carbon neutrality goals. This report provides a balanced view of the challenges and opportunities in leveraging soil carbon sequestration as part of broader climate mitigation strategies.

Can one truly understand what “flower” means without smelling a rose, touching a daisy or walking through a field of wildflowers? This question is at the core of a rich debate in philosophy and cognitive science. While embodied cognition theorists argue that physical, sensory experience is essential to concept formation, studies of the rapidly evolving large language models (LLMs)suggest that language alone can build deep, meaningful representations of the world.

Discover how researchers are using Tamm plasmonic photonic crystals and antimony trisulfide to create reconfigurable color displays. This technology enables dynamic color changes across the visible spectrum, offering potential for next-generation displays and optical devices.

A research paper by scientists at The Chinese University of Hong Kong proposed a 3D radar-based control scheme that realizes the navigated locomotion of microswimmers in 3D space with multiple static and dynamic obstacles. The new research paper, published on Jun. 2 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, presented a 3D hierarchical radar with a motion sphere and a detection sphere is firstly developed. Using the radar-based avoidance approach, the desired motion direction for the microswimmer to avoid obstacles can be obtained, and the coarse-to-fine search is used to decrease the computational load of the algorithm. Three navigation modes of the microswimmer in 3D space with dynamic conditions are realized by the radar-based navigation strategy that combines the global path planning algorithm and the radar-based avoidance approach.

Severe weather events, such as heavy rainfall, are becoming increasingly commonare on the rise worldwide. Reliable assessments of these events can save lives and protect property. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have presented developed a new method that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert low-resolution global weather data into high-resolution precipitation maps. The method is fast, efficient, and independent of location. Their findings have been published in npj Climate and Atmospheric Science: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-025-01103-y