What happens when you hurl molecules faster than sound through a vacuum chamber nearly as cold as space itself? At the University of Missouri, researchers are finding out — and discovering new ways to detect molecules under extreme conditions.

Magnetic fields give rise to many unusual electronic behaviors, such as the quantum Hall effect, but neutral particles like photons are largely unaffected. Researchers from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Sun Yat-Sen University have developed a universal design method for creating pseudomagnetic fields in silicon photonic crystals, enabling precise control over the flow of light at telecommunication wavelengths. By tuning local symmetry in the crystal structure, the team demonstrated low-loss optical devices including waveguide bends and power splitters, and validated their performance with 140-Gb/s data transmission. The work establishes a flexible platform for guiding light with artificial gauge fields, offering opportunities for next-generation photonic circuits, optical communications, and quantum information technologies.

Researchers report an in-situ passivation strategy for pure-blue perovskite light-emitting diodes (PeLEDs), promising for next-generation displays, fabricated by vacuum thermal evaporation. Co-evaporating a phenanthroline ligand (BUPH1) with perovskite precursors coordinates Pb(II) and suppresses halide-vacancy defects, reducing non-radiative losses and spectral drift. Devices emit at 472 nm (FWHM 19 nm) with an EQE of 3.1%—among the highest for thermally evaporated pure-blue PeLEDs—and maintain color stability, compatible with the ITU-R Rec.2020 wide-gamut standard. Next steps target luminance and longer lifetime via additional passivation strategies, toward thermally evaporated device stacks for industrial manufacturing. Published August 25 in Industrial Chemistry & Materials.

SciOpen, a digital publishing platform for scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals developed by Tsinghua University Press, has recently reached a major milestone: it now hosts more than 200 journals. This achievement not only highlights its strong capacity to attract high-quality journals, but also reflects its growing success in enhancing the global visibility of local journals. SciOpen has also drawn interest from international recognized institutions such as the American Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) and Tech Science Press.

E-scooters have often been identified as more dangerous than e-bikes, but that picture changes when they are compared on equal terms. A recently published study from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows in fact that the crash risk is eight times higher for e-bikes than for e-scooters, calculated based on the trip distance with rental vehicles in cities. This surprising result provides a better basis for cities to make decisions on how much to facilitate different types of micromobility.