Using local officials’ life histories alongside climate, emissions, and policy records, this study examines whether formative exposure to extreme heat shapes climate governance decades later. It finds that counties governed by officials exposed to heatwaves early in life had about 1% lower carbon emissions, with evidence pointing to stronger mitigation policies and changes away from emissions-intensive activity. The work identifies personal experience as a consequential, and often overlooked, influence on environmental policymaking.

This study compares how nationwide versus province-by-province siting of future solar and wind projects in China could affect biodiversity as the country pursues carbon neutrality. National planning can reduce overlap with species-rich conservation areas, while provincial planning can create different pressures on forest species and amphibians; neither approach performs best across every ecological measure. The analysis supports coordinated, multi-level planning that weighs several dimensions of biodiversity rather than relying on one indicator.

The researchers report a polar antiferromagnetic metallic state in the layered cobaltate Sr3Co2O7. Distinct displacements of cobalt ions create structural polarity while the material remains metallic, and the team observes antiferromagnetic order alongside an anomalous Hall response without an applied magnetic field. The findings show how geometric distortions and symmetry can be used to explore coupled electrical and magnetic behavior in quantum materials.

The first experimental measurement of tripartite quantum discord, a measure of quantum correlations among three particles that extends beyond entanglement. Using nuclear magnetic resonance, the team verified theoretical predictions about how this correlation behaves under decoherence.

The result is relevant to quantum information processing and multipartite quantum communication protocols, where understanding non-classical correlations beyond pairwise entanglement is important for designing robust multi-node quantum systems.

This randomized clinical trial evaluated whether replacing regular salt with a potassium-enriched salt substitute could reduce recurrent stroke and death among 15,249 stroke survivors in rural China. The researchers found that salt substitution reduced recurrent stroke risk by 14%, lowered overall mortality by 12%, and reduced stroke-related deaths by 21%, without increasing the risk of hyperkalemia. The key breakthrough is the provision of large-scale direct clinical evidence that a simple, low-cost dietary intervention can significantly improve long-term outcomes for stroke survivors, making salt substitution a practical and scalable strategy for secondary stroke prevention and cardiovascular health worldwide.

This study discovered that endosomes, cellular compartments traditionally known for sorting and transporting molecules inside cells, also play a direct role in breaking down lipid droplets, the organelles that store fat within cells. Using a newly developed fluorescent probe called AP1-coumarin, the researchers observed that lipid droplets physically interact with and can even be engulfed by intermediate endosomes. They found that disrupting endosomal trafficking caused lipid droplets and triglycerides to accumulate, while enhancing endosomal maturation accelerated fat breakdown. The study also revealed a previously unknown two-way relationship between lipid droplets and endosomes, showing that each helps regulate the other's function. The main breakthrough is the identification of endosomal trafficking as a previously unrecognized pathway involved in lipid droplet degradation and lipid homeostasis, providing new insights into cellular fat metabolism that could ultimately help inform treatments for diseases linked to fat imbalance, including obesity, diabetes, Alzheimer's disease, and cancer.

The authors introduce ValueActionLens, a framework that tests whether language models’ stated values match the choices they make in culturally and socially varied scenarios. Their experiments find substantial gaps between what models say they value and how they act, with the mismatch changing across models and contexts. Recognized as an EMNLP 2025 Outstanding Paper, the study cautions that verbal declarations alone are not a reliable measure of model behavior.

Combining first-principles calculations with models of superconducting pairing, the authors show that small changes in the electronic environment of La3Ni2O7 can switch its predicted pairing symmetry. The result helps explain why theoretical studies of this recently discovered high-temperature nickelate have reached different conclusions, and points to crystal-field tuning as a way to investigate its superconducting state.

The researchers intercalated copper atoms into the low-symmetry 1T′ phase of molybdenum disulfide while maintaining high crystallinity and thermal stability to about 300 °C. Structural analysis showed that copper partially occupies tetrahedral interstitial sites aligned with molybdenum atoms. The resulting material displays insulating hopping transport and a large negative temperature coefficient of resistance of roughly -4% to -2% per kelvin. The work expands the set of controllable intercalated two-dimensional materials and shows how atomic-scale insertion can produce unusual electronic behavior.

Researchers developed a composite solid polymer electrolyte that binds N,N-dimethylformamide (DMF) as ligands in a Hofmann coordination framework instead of leaving the solvent freely mobile. The locally DMF-rich environment improves lithium-ion transport while reducing solvent decomposition at the lithium-metal interface. The electrolyte reached room-temperature ionic conductivity of 6.5 × 10^-4 S cm^-1, supported more than 6,000 hours of Li||Li cycling, and enabled sulfurized-polyacrylonitrile full cells to operate for 1,000 cycles at 1 C. The work offers a route to combine high polymer-electrolyte conductivity with longer lithium-metal battery life.

The study uses cobalt sulfide as a model Li–CO2 battery catalyst and introduces sulfur vacancies to tune its electronic structure. Adjusting the d- and p-band centers strengthens orbital hybridization and accelerates the reversible reactions between lithium and carbon dioxide, changing both discharge behavior and product deposition. The optimized bidirectional catalyst achieved a 0.62 V overpotential, 82.8% energy efficiency, and nearly 600 hours of stable cycling. Calculations and multiphysics simulations were used to connect the electronic-structure changes to the improved reaction kinetics.

This work addresses oxygen release from nickel-rich lithium-ion cathodes at high voltage by forming a multifunctional cathode-electrolyte interphase in situ. Unlike a fixed surface coating, the interphase is designed to repair itself and continuously capture reactive oxygen species during cycling. NCM811 cells remained stable under demanding conditions including 4.8 V operation, 60 °C temperature, and 10 C fast charging. A 1 Ah graphite||NCM811 pouch cell retained 79.6% capacity after 600 cycles at 4.4 V, demonstrating the approach at a more practical cell scale.

The team experimentally demonstrated room-temperature light storage near a non-Hermitian exceptional point using nonlinear Brillouin scattering in a chip-scale optical microcavity. Coupling optical and acoustic modes creates a parity-time-symmetric system in which the dispersion changes sharply between slow- and fast-light regimes. Near the transition, an optical pulse could be halted for almost half a millisecond in a microcavity only about 90 micrometers in radius. The result points toward compact optical delay and storage components for photonic communications and quantum information systems.

Contrary to the usual expectation that defects reduce thermal transport, this study shows that defect scattering can increase nanoscale thermal conductance. Molecular-dynamics and Boltzmann-transport calculations indicate that a defect-free nanoscale heating region can overpopulate phonons traveling in unfavorable directions, while defects randomize their directions and restore a more favorable distribution. In the modeled systems, this effect increased thermal conductance by as much as 75% and persisted across multiple temperatures, materials, and sizes. The work suggests a counterintuitive defect-engineering strategy for managing heat at nanoscale dimensions.

The researchers developed a decoupled seawater electrolysis system intended to suppress the chlorine-producing side reaction that normally competes with oxygen evolution. A ferricyanide/ferrocyanide redox mediator carries electrons between the electrolysis cell and a separate oxygen-evolution reactor, replacing the conventional anodic reaction in the seawater cell. The system operated at about 1.37 V at 10 mA cm^-2 and 1.57 V at 100 mA cm^-2 and remained stable even in chloride-saturated electrolyte while avoiding chlorine-containing products. The design offers a route toward lower-voltage direct seawater hydrogen production.

Penn State and Shanghai Jiao Tong-led teams report ladderphane copolymers that cut electrical conductivity by more than an order of magnitude versus prior polymers at high fields and heat, while pi-pi stacking yields through-plane thermal conductivity of 1.96 ± 0.06 W m-1 K-1. At 200C the material delivers 5.34 J cm-3 discharged energy density at 90% charge-discharge efficiency, with strong cyclic stability and breakdown self-healing.

The researchers demonstrated monolithic three-dimensional integration of atomically thin MoS2 transistors with vertically stacked resistive random-access memory. A single transistor was integrated with four vertical RRAM layers using a fabrication process kept below 300 °C so upper layers did not damage devices underneath. The memory cells supported multiple resistance states, while circuit modeling projected major reductions in area, read latency, and read energy compared with planar memory layouts. The work provides a path toward denser and more energy-efficient vertically integrated memory systems.

This study analyzed 2,696 U.S. adults aged 50+ from NHANES 2009–2012 and used Mendelian randomization to examine whether the oral microbiome contributes to frailty. It found that greater oral microbial diversity was consistently associated with lower frailty, and identified specific bacterial taxa that may have protective or risk-promoting effects. The authors conclude that the oral microbiome may serve as both a biomarker and a modifiable target for promoting healthy aging. In simple terms, people with a healthier, more diverse community of bacteria in their mouths tended to be less frail, suggesting that improving the oral microbiome could help support healthier aging.

This study experimentally investigated how rotating objects interact through the fluid flows they generate, creating a contactless form of rotational coupling between submerged rotors. The researchers found that a spinning rotor can transfer rotation to a nearby passive rotor through hydrodynamic forces alone, producing not only the expected gear-like counterrotation but also unexpected corotation modes in which both rotors spin in the same direction. By mapping how these behaviors depend on rotor spacing, confinement, and flow conditions, the study identified geometric, topological, and inertial transitions that govern the switch between coupling modes. The findings establish a new framework for understanding and controlling hydrodynamic spin-spin interactions, demonstrating a fluid-based analogue of mechanical gears that could be useful for soft robotics, microfluidics, and other systems where frictionless, contact-free motion transfer is desirable.

Replicating a known human-juror study, researchers tested whether large language models evaluate firearm-examiner testimony differently than people do. A knowledge-enhanced AI system gave more cautious, scientifically grounded assessments than a standard LLM.

Unlike human jurors in the original study, neither AI system convicted based on inconclusive forensic evidence. The findings are relevant to AI-assisted review of forensic testimony and to wrongful-conviction prevention efforts.