Thousands of rapidly evolving aphid proteins initially resisted both conventional sequence comparisons and AlphaFold2. By sequencing closely related aphid species and supplying the missing evolutionary context, researchers uncovered a shared structural blueprint across approximately 2,400 proteins and established a method that may help scientists study other fast-evolving proteins involved in immunity, host-parasite interactions, and agriculture.

China’s agriculture has long faced three major problems: excessive chemical fertilizer application, residual mulch film pollution, and low utilization rates of livestock and poultry manure. Excessive fertilizer input leads to soil acidification and compaction, and nutrient use efficiency continues to decline. Traditional polyethylene (PE) mulch film is difficult to degrade, and its year-by-year accumulation forms microplastic pollution, damaging soil microbial communities and arable land health. At the same time, livestock waste such as cow manure is large in volume and widely distributed, but its resource utilization pathways are limited, and crop-livestock cycling is not smooth. The green transformation of agriculture urgently needs integrated technologies that simultaneously ensure stable yields, reduce fertilizer use, reduce plastic pollution, and improve soil fertility.

A widely burned agricultural waste rapeseed straw is used as an effective, eco-friendly corrosion inhibitor for cold-rolled steel in methanesulfonic acid.

Researchers have turned lightweight balsa wood into a strong, water-resistant composite by filling its pores with polylactic acid (PLA) built from small molecules inside the wood itself.

With the unique advantages that very low Earth orbit (VLEO) satellites have demonstrated in fields such as high-resolution remote sensing, the contradiction between the demand for large-volume data downlink and the extremely short visibility windows of ground stations has become increasingly prominent. Sun-synchronous orbit VLEO satellites typically have only one to two ground station passes per day, each lasting only a few minutes, far from sufficient to meet the high-throughput data downlink requirements generated by missions such as high-resolution imaging and video surveillance. However, existing relay architectures are unsuitable for small satellites due to constraints in mass, power consumption, and latency; low-rate terminals can only provide basic telemetry; conventional proportional–integral–derivative controllers struggle to maintain accuracy under nonlinear and strong disturbance environments; and nonlinear model predictive control imposes excessive computational burdens. Therefore, how to coordinately optimize the resource allocation and control strategies of VLEO satellites and relay constellations to achieve an effective balance between data transmission efficiency and onboard computational capability has become a key technical challenge in supporting high-capacity VLEO missions.