In a visionary commentary that bridges the gap between theory and practice, leading environmental scientists from China are pioneering a new approach to assessing the health of aquatic ecosystems. Titled "Aquatic Ecosystem Health Assessment in China Based on Metacommunity Theory: From Theory to Practice," this insightful piece is co-authored by Prof. Xiaowei Jin from the China National Environmental Monitoring Centre and Prof. Fengchang Wu from the State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, both based in Beijing, China. Their work offers a fresh perspective on how metacommunity theory can be applied to real-world environmental challenges.

Researchers at WashU Medicine have developed a noninvasive medicine delivered through the nose that successfully eliminated deadly brain tumors in mice. The medicine is based on a spherical nucleic acid, a nanomaterial that travels along a nerve from the nose to the brain, where it triggers an immune response to eliminate the tumor.

All the cells in an organism have the exact same genetic sequence. What differs across cell types is their epigenetics—meticulously placed chemical tags that influence which genes get expressed in each cell. If epigenetic changes regulate our genetics, what is regulating them? Salk scientists have now used plant cells to discover that a type of epigenetic tag, called DNA methylation, can be regulated by genetic mechanisms. Prior to this study, scientists had only understood how DNA methylation was regulated by other epigenetic features, so the discovery that genetic features can also guide DNA methylation patterns is a major paradigm shift. Their findings could inform future epigenetic engineering strategies aimed at generating methylation patterns predicted to repair or enhance cell function, with many potential applications in medicine and agriculture.

With the advancement of Internet applications, the global demand for broadband satellite communication services is incessantly escalating. Furthermore, there exists an exponential surge in the requisition for the capacity of satellite communication systems. In response to this evolving demand, the domain of satellite communication technology is progressively evolving toward the realm of high-throughput satellite (HTS) communication systems. The typical technical characteristics of HTS are: (a) the satellite adopts multibeam technology for beam overlapping coverage of the service area, which improves the quality of the wireless link while realizing the spatial dimension segmentation; (b) based on this, the system adopts multiple frequency multiplexing to improve the communication capacity of a single satellite; (c) gateway stations are tightly coupled with user beam clusters to complete two-hop communication, which makes multiple gateway stations share the communication resources of the same satellite, forming a spatial isolation of the gateway stations, and once again realizing the frequency multiplexing of the gateway station links. A key requirement for future multibeam broadband satellite communication systems is the ability to flexibly adjust beam capacity according to changes in business distribution, in order to meet time-varying business requirements. Beam hopping technology provides an efficient solution to achieve the efficient use of frequency resources and power resources. At the same time, the use of beam hopping makes the beam hopping of satellite payload need to match the business signals of ground signal stations, bringing about the need for synchronization of beam hopping between satellite and ground.

In a study published in Science Advances, researchers describe a membrane achieved a record-breaking selectivity of 1,800, meaning it allows hydrogen to pass through 1,800 times more easily than CO2. Membranes like this, due to their energy efficiency and absence of chemical wastes, are critically important to reducing carbon emissions and supporting cleaner industrial processes.

A new study by Rice engineers shows that lab-grown diamond coatings could help diminish mineral scaling in industrial piping, providing an alternative to chemical additives and mechanical cleaning, both of which offer only temporary relief and carry environmental or operational downsides.