For solid-state batteries, moving lithium ions efficiently is only part of the challenge — how the material behaves mechanically can matter too. Rice University researchers in the departments of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Chemistry and Materials Science and Nanoengineering and at the Rice Advanced Materials Institute have developed a relatively soft, flexible material that can selectively transport lithium ions — offering a new approach to porous solid electrolytes that combine efficient ion movement with better mechanical adaptability inside a battery. The research was published in Chemical Science.

UC San Diego chemical and nano engineering professor Liangfang Zhang has been named a 2026 MacArthur Fellow for his pioneering approach in creating cell-mimicking nanoparticles to treat disease. His invention is a kind of cellular disguise. He takes membranes from human cells and uses them to cloak tiny, biodegradable particles about one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Armed with these disguises, the nanosized particles can deliver drugs where they are needed, as well as act as "nanosponges" that absorb and remove disease-causing molecules.

Satellites that navigate by talking to each other slowly lose their sense of direction, because nothing in a purely Earth-orbiting network provides a fixed reference in space.

With the continuous advancement of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) technology, L-band SAR has come to play an increasingly important role in Earth observation; however, its imaging, interferometric, and polarimetric performance are susceptible to ionospheric disturbances. In equatorial nighttime data, amplitude streak artifacts induced by equatorial plasma bubbles frequently occur and have traditionally been regarded as interference factors in SAR imaging. Nevertheless, these artifacts essentially carry critical information on ionospheric irregularities and can be exploited to retrieve physical parameters such as scintillation intensity and turbulence spectral indices. Existing methods either rely on comparisons between disturbed and undisturbed images or are limited to preliminary one-dimensional parameter estimation along the track, making it difficult to achieve two-dimensional fine-scale retrieval of scintillation structures, and lacking systematic validation of their spatial correlation with equatorial ionospheric anomalies. Therefore, how to extract the two-dimensional spatial distribution of ionospheric scintillation parameters from amplitude streak artifacts and reveal their intrinsic relationship with regions of enhanced electron density has become an important scientific question in the field of ionospheric remote sensing.