Networking, exchanging experience, pooling knowledge, enhancing skills – these are the objectives of the new EPICUR Hubs that have been developed under the leadership of KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology). Being primarily virtual, these centers are intended to promote the collaboration between young European scientists and to facilitate their networking across disciplines and borders in research, teaching, innovation, and transfer. The first EPICUR Hub themed “Sustainable Transformation” started on April 08, 2025 with a virtual kick-off event.

National University of Singapore (NUS) chemists have developed an “anchoring-borrowing” strategy, combined with facet engineering, to develop a new class of artful single-atom catalysts (ASACs). These catalysts are formed by anchoring foreign single atoms onto specific facets of reducible support materials, allowing them to bypass the traditional oxidative addition step in cross-coupling reactions, which are widely used in the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries.

Microplastics and the much smaller nanoplastics enter the human body in various ways, for example through food or the air we breathe. A large proportion is excreted, but a certain amount remains in organs, blood and other body fluids. In the FFG bridge project Nano-VISION, which was launched two years ago together with the start-up BRAVE Analytics, a team led by Harald Fitzek from the Institute of Electron Microscopy and Nanoanalysis at Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) and an ophthalmologist from Graz addressed the question of whether nanoplastics also play a role in ophthalmology. The project partners have now been able to develop a method for detecting and quantifying nanoplastics in transparent body fluids and determining their chemical composition. As an exemplary application of the method, the research team is investigating whether intraocular lenses release nanoplastics. There have been no such studies to date, and initial results have already been submitted to a scientific journal.

UOB and the Wee Foundation have pledged a combined gift of S$110 million to Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore). With government matching, the gift will create an endowment of up to S$275 million to advance the university’s strategic priorities.

Osaka Metropolitan University researchers tested whether introducing light into the bedroom before waking would improve morning wakefulness and found an amount of time that seems to help fight off fatigue and raise alertness most.

A new study in the peer-reviewed Journal of Neurotrauma aims to determine the extent to which Glasgow Outcome Scale Extended (GOSE) scores that take into account the combined effect of the brain and extracranial injuries (GOSE-All scores) differ from scores excluding effects attributed to extracranial injuries (GOSE-TBI scores) among patients who were treated at Level 1 trauma centers in the U.S.