Chemical organization in reaction-diffusion systems offer a strategy to generate materials with ordered morphologies and architecture. Periodic structures can be formed using molecules or nanoparticles. An emerging frontier in materials science aims to combine nanoparticles and molecules. In a new report on Science Advances, Amanda J. Ackroyd and a team of scientists in chemistry, physics and nanomaterials in Canada, Hungary and the U.S. noted how solvent evaporation from a suspension of […]

Physicists from the University of Luxembourg have recently presented a new material which can become a key component of a new infrastructure designed to help robots understand their surroundings. The team shows that the material can be used to introduce tailor-made graphical information in the environment, which is invisible to humans but easily readable by robots. The new material and the innovative procedure by which it is made possible have been recently published in Advanced Functional […]

As we continue to manage the ongoing pandemic, the role that viruses play has never been more relevant. They are present and attack pretty much every single living organism, from the biggest whale to the smallest bacteria, including a type of blue-green algae known as cyanobacteria.

During the summer of 2020, especially June and July, periods of extreme heavy rainfall occurred in China's Yangtze River Valley (YRV). These rain events caused the severest floods for the region since the summer of 1998. Despite this, the 2020 western North Pacific (WNP) typhoon season started slowly, but eventually produced 23 named tropical cyclones, still slightly below 27, the WNP seasonal average. As summer transitioned to winter, three severe cold surges swept most parts of China during […]

The aquatic animal known as the sponge is often described as entirely sessile: once they've settled in a spot and matured, they aren't generally thought of as moving around. But, according to a new study in the journal Current Biology on April 26—in which researchers describe mysterious trails of light brown sponge spicules (spike-like support elements in sponges) across the Arctic seafloor—that isn't always so.