River sediments are not simply passive sinks for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). A study combining global observations with multimedia modeling suggests that climate-driven changes in sediment–water exchange could increase future PAH concentrations and ecological risks in the Yangtze and Huanghe watersheds, while the St. Lawrence watershed may follow a different, lower-risk trajectory.

This study shows that the recovery of the critically endangered Pinus dabeshanensis depends heavily on a few highly productive mother trees. After monitoring 88 adult trees over three years, researchers found that most trees produced no seeds, while just six trees produced more than 70% of all mature seeds. Seed dispersal success was mainly linked to how many mature seeds each tree produced. The findings suggest that conservation efforts should focus on protecting and supporting these key mother trees.

A review published in Nano Research systematically examines how acid treatment engineers the optoelectronic properties of two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides, confronting the long-standing trade-off between optical enhancement and electrical performance. Superacid treatment boosts photoluminescence quantum yields toward unity by passivating sulfur vacancies, yet often degrades field-effect transistor transport. The authors rationalize this paradox with a sulfur-vacancy-mediated hopping transport model and assess strategies from two-step thiol–acid passivation to Lewis acid substitutional doping that decouple optical and electronic responses. Future directions include machine-learning-assisted atomic-scale characterization and defect-diverse studies, aiming to transform passive defect passivation into active functionality design.

This study examines how dryland vegetation in northern China responds to interannual droughts using satellite data from 2001 to 2022. The researchers found that severe drought changes the balance between drought resistance and post-drought recovery. Under moderate drought, plants that resisted drought well also tended to recover well, but under severe drought this became a tradeoff. Arid ecosystems appeared more fragile as drought intensified, while semi-arid areas relied more on recovery. The findings highlight the need to consider both resistance and recovery in dryland restoration and management.

The fabrication of high-performance 3D hydrogel scaffolds for tissue engineering requires a balance between mechanical stiffness and structural integrity, yet single-wavelength femtosecond laser processing has struggled to achieve both simultaneously. A dual-wavelength dual-pulse strategy with optimized spatiotemporal coordination has now been applied to the preparation of three-dimensional hydrogel cell scaffolds, overcoming the inherent limitations of single-wavelength processing and enabling 20-layer bubble-free scaffolds with enhanced mechanical properties and in-situ nanoscale topography for improved cellular responses.

5G/6G expansion intensifies electromagnetic interference, demanding high‑performance absorbers (EWAs). Conventional equilibrium syntheses suffer from slow diffusion and long heating, driving materials toward stable configurations that erase defect‑rich, metastable features beneficial for microwave loss. Flash Joule heating (FJH) offers a paradigm shift: millisecond electrical pulses generate >3000 K and ultrafast quenching, trapping materials in non‑equilibrium states. This perspective establishes FJH as a programmable platform for designing EWAs with tailored defects, metastable interfaces, and discontinuous networks.

Organic fluorophores operating in the second near-infrared window can provide deep-tissue images with high contrast, but their performance often depends on nanocarriers that can prevent hydrophobic dyes from leaking in complex biological environments. Researchers at Tong and Xiang’s group have developed multivalent tetraphenylethylene-modified DNA nanoaggregates that remain assembled under denaturing conditions, stably retain NIR-II fluorophores, and enable high-contrast vascular imaging in living mice.