A study in Forest Ecosystems found that combining bedding plows with pre-plant herbicide application, rather than double bedding, delivers the largest and most sustained gains in pine volume. This two-pass system effectively controls woody shrubs, the main long-term competitor, allowing pines to thrive for decades.

A Forest Ecosystems study highlights how forest landscape restoration (FLR) can play a critical role in improving water availability and ecosystem health across tropical regions. Drawing on decades of field studies, modeling, and global research, the study emphasizes that healthy soils and reliable water supplies are essential for both people and ecosystems to thrive.

Power systems are among the most complex man-made systems. However, complexity is not inherently an advantage. In fact, complex dynamics are often the underlying cause of complicated stability issues. In the future 100% renewable power system, converter-interfaced generation (CIG) becomes the main form of power generation, the dynamic of which are dominated by control processes and can be reduced with proper control strategies. Following this idea, researchers at Tsinghua University propose a frequency-fixed grid-forming control (FF-GFM) that controls CIGs as constant voltage sources within their capability limitations. FF-GFM can reduce frequency dynamics and synchronization dynamics, greatly enhancing the stability and safety of the system.

A multicenter study published in hLife has developed a novel risk prediction model for postoperative infections in kidney and liver transplant recipients. The research, involving 615 patients from six Chinese hospitals, identified previously overlooked predictors such as tea-drinking habits, psychological guilt scores, and dietary rhythms. The model achieved an area under the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve of 0.78 in the training set, demonstrating strong predictive performance. These findings highlight the importance of integrating behavioral and psychological factors into clinical risk assessment, paving the way for more holistic post-transplant care strategies.

The exploration-exploitation dilemma is a long-standing topic in deep reinforcement learning. In recent research, a noise-driven enhancement for exploration algorithm has proposed for UAV autonomous navigation. This algorithm introduces a differentiated exploration noise control strategy based on the global navigation training hit rate and the specific situations encountered by the UAV in each episode. Furthermore, it designs a noise dual experience replay buffer to amplify the distinct effects of noisy and deterministic experiences. This approach reduces the computational cost associated with excessive exploration and mitigates the problem of the navigation policy converging to a local optimum.

Silicon carbide (SiC) and silicon nitride (Si₃N₄) powders are critical raw materials for advanced ceramics. However, traditional synthesis methods face four major challenges: difficulty in achieving SiC nanosizing, difficulty in realizing Si₃N₄ high purification, the need for external energy input for the weakly exothermic Si-C reaction, and the requirement of adding large amounts of diluents to enable the combustion synthesis of the strongly exothermic Si-N₂ reaction. Recently, a research team utilized the difference in heat release between the Si-N₂ and Si-C reactions. By means of chemical furnace encapsulation, the strong heat release from the Si-N₂ reaction was used to induce the combustion synthesis of the weakly exothermic Si-C reaction system. Through the regulation of the combustion reaction temperature field and the partial pressure of CO reducing gas, β-SiC powders with an average particle size of only 30 nm and high-purity pink β-Si₃N₄ powders with an oxygen content as low as 0.46 wt% were successfully synthesized. Their work is published in the journal Industrial Chemistry & Materials on 10 October.

As the demand for high-quality, healthy solid-state lighting (SSL) grows, violet-light-excited full-spectrum lighting has emerged as a promising solution—it avoids blue light hazards and mimics natural sunlight. However, the critical yellow luminescent materials for this scheme are extremely scarce, plagued by low violet-light absorption and poor photoluminescent quantum yield (PLQY). To address this gap, a research team developed glass network engineering for the B₂O₃-BaO-Sc₂O₃ system, successfully fabricating violet-light-excitable yellow-emitting Ba₂Sc₂B₄O₁₁ (BSB):Ce³⁺ glass ceramics (GCs) with a record PLQY of 95.0% and superior thermal, moisture, and irradiation stability. By optimizing the [BO₃]/[BO₄] ratio, the team promoted heterogeneous nucleation during in-situ crystallization, forming well-crystallized BSB nanocrystals (NCs) in the glass matrix. This advancement enabled the construction of LED/LD-driven full-spectrum light sources with a color rendering index (CRI) exceeding 93, accelerating the development of sun-like lighting technology.

Transition metal carbides are prized for their exceptional hardness and stability under extreme conditions, but they are notoriously brittle. This intrinsic trade-off between hardness and toughness has long hindered their application in demanding fields. A research team has developed a novel strategy that uses nitrogen doping to fundamentally re-engineer the microstructure of (Ti, Zr)C ceramics. This approach unleashes a powerful toughening mechanism during a process called spinodal decomposition, resulting in a remarkable simultaneous increase of approximately 40% in hardness and 50% in toughness. This breakthrough provides a new blueprint for designing next-generation ceramics with superior reliability.

The development of proton conductors that demostrate high conductivity with mechanical resilience is critical for advancing energy devices operating under harsh conditions. Polymer nanocomposites offer a promising route to reconcile these competing requirements through strategic material design. In this work, we report an anhydrous proton-conducting nanocomposite composed of a comb-like crosslinked polymer network and superacidic polyoxometalate (POM) clusters. The modular tunability of both polymer topology and inorganic clusters establishes this approach as a generalizable platform for tailoring ion-transport materials and opens new avenues for high-performance energy technologies.