Solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) offer a clean alternative to fossil fuel-based power generation, but their high operating temperatures hinder widespread use. In a recent study, researchers from Japan developed ultra-thin, highly ordered samarium-doped cerium oxide electrolyte films that overcome the long-standing issue of grain boundary resistance, enabling efficient operation at much lower temperatures. Their design achieved record-setting oxide-ion conductivity and paves the way for safer, more affordable SOFCs for sustainable power generation.

A new study has identified the first known gene in eggplant that provides resistance to begomoviruses, a group of plant viruses responsible for major crop losses worldwide. The research shows that virus-resistant plants accumulate far less viral DNA than susceptible plants, linked to a gene encoding an exonuclease involved in viral defense. This previously unknown resistance pathway could support the breeding of virus-resistant crops, strengthen food security, and reduce reliance on chemical pesticides.

The hunting of large whales goes back much further in time than previously thought. New research from the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the Department of Prehistory of the UAB reveals that Indigenous communities in southern Brazil were hunting large cetaceans 5,000 years ago, around a thousand years before the earliest documented evidence from Arctic and North Pacific societies.

The COSTA system pioneers cascade spatio-temporal attention plus memory-distilled iterative cross-modal alignment, cutting redundant video clutter and lifting dialogue response quality to new SOTA on long, dynamic videos.

SGR turns adversarial shortcuts into teachers, isolating invariant subgraph rationales and delivering the first XGL framework provably robust against spurious correlations on both synthetic and real-world graphs.

A MOF-derived hollow tubular g-C₃N₄/ZnIn₂S₄ S-scheme heterojunction has been developed for efficient photocatalytic nitric oxide (NO) conversion, achieving a high removal rate of 67.29% and superior selectivity toward non-toxic nitrate.

An international group of researchers says that biodiversity conservation and scientific research are not benefiting from the vast knowledge about the world’s plants held by botanic gardens, because of fragmented data systems and a lack of standardisation. They call for a unified and equitable global data system for living collections to transform how the world’s botanic gardens manage and share information. This would enable them to work together as a ‘meta-collection’ to strengthen scientific research and conservation efforts.