A research team led by Prof. Zhang Jinglei from Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that the trilayer nickelate La4Ni3O10-δ exhibits a nearly isotropic upper critical field under high pressure. This finding provides important experimental insight into the superconducting mechanism of nickel-based materials.
Training in computational thinking can improve a student's ability to tackle complex problems, according to research in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning, which examined both students' perceptions of their own skills and their demonstrated performance. The findings come at a time when higher education faces increased pressure to equip students with transferable skills for a changing workplace.
The Gaia mission has allowed researchers to understand the motions of stars like never before, even revealing possible interactions between our solar system and nearby stars. Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Nathan Kaib and collaborator Sean Raymond (Universite de Bordeaux) have found that a recent stellar passage likely triggered a huge increase in comet formation as the star's gravity altered Oort cloud objects' orbits, sending them cascading into the inner solar system. We may even still be feeling the effects of this passage today. This work is being presented at the American Astronomical Society Division on Dynamical Astronomy.
It's no secret that U.S. housing has gotten less affordable. From 2019 to 2025, average home prices rose 60%, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Researchers have developed light-transmitting hydrogel fibers that are just hundreds of micrometers in diameter. With further development, these soft fibers could one day make it possible to use imaging techniques to detect early breast cancer hidden inside very small breast ducts.
Research by Penn sociologist Pilar Gonalons-Pons and others has shown that after a man and a woman have a child, the couple's relative share of paid and unpaid labor tends to change dramatically, with the father specializing in paid work and the mother in child care.
Loneliness among young adults has reached what the U.S. surgeon general has called an "epidemic," with recent estimates suggesting that roughly half of U.S. adults report feeling lonely, and rates are particularly high among people ages 18–29. A new study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, appearing in the Journal of Adolescent Health, explores how social media itself can be used to address the problem.
Crushed concrete from legacy nuclear facilities could play a far greater role in safely managing radioactive land than previously understood. Research published in ACS ES&T Water and conducted by scientists from the University of Manchester, United Kingdom National Nuclear Laboratory and Clemson University has examined how crushed concrete interacts with strontium-90, a mobile radioactive contaminant found at nuclear legacy sites such as Sellafield and Hanford.
A research team at Mahidol University, Thailand, has discovered that tosyl groups, long regarded as routine synthetic handles, can actively guide the formation and behavior of pillararenes—a class of pillar-shaped macrocyclic molecules widely used in supramolecular chemistry. Their findings, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, reveal that these groups can act as a hidden "instruction code" that influences the organization of molecular components before bond formation and enables temperature-triggered switching accompanied by visible color changes.
Biomaterials with extraordinary properties, such as spider silk, have so far been known primarily from animals. Researchers at the University of Salzburg in Austria have now deciphered a surprising counterpart from the world of single-celled organisms: The shells of tintinnids, microscopic planktonic organisms, consist of self-assembling structural proteins that form a particularly resilient material and are capable of absorbing UV light. This is the first description of a biomaterial produced by a eukaryotic single-celled organism (protist), establishing tintinnids as a new model system for the future development of advanced biomaterials. More than 200 years after the discovery of tintinnids, the composition of their shells has finally been deciphered.
