Researchers in Japan created some of the world’s smallest semiconducting nanotubes, structures 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. By growing molybdenum disulfide inside protective tubes of boron nitride, researchers, including those from the University of Tokyo, produced highly uniform tubes just 1 nanometer wide, a scale at which it’s difficult to make stable nanotube structures. The work confirms decades-old theoretical predictions about how these ultrafine materials behave and could also provide a new route toward miniaturized electronic devices. 

Researchers at Tulane University have found that the world’s mangrove forests are no longer in decline and have shifted to overall growth in recent years. Using four decades of satellite data, a new study shows that natural regeneration, expansion into newly formed coastal habitats and conservation efforts have largely offset decades of mangrove loss, offering a rare conservation success story and a hopeful sign for climate resilience.

Carnegie’s Andrew Newman led a team of astronomers that used JWST to make  the first direct mass measurement of a dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy from the early universe. Previously, this technique had only been used to study black holes in the local universe. But JWST and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing enabled the researchers to use it on a galaxy that's light is reaching us from when the universe was just 3 billion years old. 

A long-running partnership between ACP Technologies and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has helped move advanced pitch materials from laboratory development to pilot-scale production — supporting new domestic capabilities in synthetic graphite and carbon fiber manufacturing. 

Researchers used a novel data generation pipeline to build ChartNet, a large synthetic dataset of chart images paired with corresponding information. They used this training dataset to improve the performance of generative AI models at challenging tasks like data extraction and chart reconstruction.

A study led by researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso concludes that photovoltaic panels in Alamogordo, New Mexico—a region frequently affected by dust storms carrying particles from the White Sands gypsum dune field—lose only about 2% to 3% of their power output because of dust accumulation, a rate far lower than that of solar facilities in comparable desert regions worldwide.