Newswise — Lithium-ion batteries currently dominate portable electronics and electric vehicles, but the uneven distribution and high cost of lithium resources have raised concerns about long-term supply. Sodium-ion batteries have emerged as a promising alternative because sodium is abundant, inexpensive, and widely distributed. Among the many cathode materials studied, layered transition-metal oxides have attracted particular attention due to their high capacity and relatively simple synthesis. However, these materials suffer from several major limitations, including structural instability, complex phase transitions during cycling, and poor air stability. When exposed to moisture or carbon dioxide, the active sodium can react to form inactive compounds, blocking ion transport and reducing battery performance. Based on these challenges, further research is needed to develop more stable cathode structures for sodium-ion batteries.

Researchers from Central South University and collaborating institutions reported (DOI: 10.1002/cey2.70115) a new cathode design strategy in the journal Carbon Energy that enhances the stability of sodium-ion batteries. The study introduces a layered cathode material with a radial gradient distribution of sodium content, phase structure, and transition-metal valence states. This structural design simultaneously improves ion transport kinetics and resistance to environmental degradation. By preventing harmful reactions with water and carbon dioxide, the cathode maintains its electrochemical performance even under humid conditions, addressing one of the key challenges limiting the commercialization of sodium-ion batteries.

To construct the gradient structure, the team first synthesized nickel–manganese hydroxide precursors with a core–shell configuration using a controlled coprecipitation method. The inner core consisted mainly of Ni₀.₅Mn₀.₅(OH)₂, while the outer layer had a different composition, forming a radial concentration gradient. During subsequent solid-state sintering, elemental diffusion gradually blurred the interface between layers, generating a continuous transition from an outer P2/O3 mixed phase to an inner O3 phase structure.

Advanced microscopy and spectroscopy techniques confirmed the presence of radial gradients in sodium concentration, phase distribution, and transition-metal valence states. This architecture provides multiple functional advantages. The surface P2/O3 mixed phase increases the oxidation state of transition metals, suppressing Na⁺/H⁺ exchange reactions and improving resistance to water and CO₂. Meanwhile, the O3 phase in the interior maintains high sodium storage capacity.

Electrochemical tests showed that the optimized material delivered significantly improved cycling stability compared with the conventional cathode. After 200 cycles, the modified sample retained about 80% of its capacity, whereas the unmodified material retained only about 21%. The gradient structure also enhanced sodium-ion diffusion kinetics and reduced polarization during charge and discharge.
Importantly, the cathode demonstrated remarkable environmental stability. Even after 10 hours of exposure to humid air containing CO₂, the material maintained a first-cycle capacity of 103.8 mAh g⁻¹, and the capacity loss decreased dramatically from 50.12% to 12.35%.

According to the researchers, the success of the design lies in integrating multiple stability mechanisms into a single architecture. The radial gradient structure simultaneously regulates composition, phase distribution, and electronic states across the material. This approach not only stabilizes the crystal lattice during repeated sodium insertion and extraction but also protects the surface from environmental reactions. The team notes that such structural engineering could serve as a general strategy for designing next-generation cathode materials with improved durability and safety, especially for large-scale energy storage technologies where cost and long-term stability are critical.

The findings provide an important step toward the commercialization of sodium-ion batteries. Because sodium is abundant and inexpensive, these batteries are considered strong candidates for grid-scale energy storage, renewable energy integration, and backup power systems. However, poor air stability of cathode materials has been a major obstacle to practical deployment. The gradient-structured cathode introduced in this study addresses this issue by preventing moisture- and CO₂-induced degradation while maintaining high electrochemical performance. In the future, similar gradient design strategies could be applied to other battery materials, accelerating the development of cost-effective and environmentally resilient energy storage technologies for the global transition toward clean energy.

###

References

DOI

10.1002/cey2.70115

Original Source URL

https://doi.org/10.1002/cey2.70115

Funding information

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52202338).

About Carbon Energy

Carbon Energy is an open access energy technology journal publishing innovative interdisciplinary clean energy research from around the world. The journal welcomes contributions detailing cutting-edge energy technology involving carbon utilization and carbon emission control, such as energy storage, photocatalysis, electrocatalysis, photoelectrocatalysis and thermocatalysis.

BYLINE: Ashleigh Papp

Newswise — Using a tool to solve a protein’s structure, for most researchers in the world of structural biology and computational chemistry, is not unlike using the Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of ancient Egyptian texts. Once a protein’s structure has been discovered, or defined, one can infer crucial information about its function or, in a diseased state, its dysfunction. While researchers have been pursuing the quest of solving protein structure for decades, advancing tools and computing technologies offer a new frontier for this work.

A collaborative study recently published in Nature Communications unveiled a new computing program that offers a faster and more accurate way to determine protein structure at a new level of precision. Researchers from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), along with an international team of researchers, were a part of the effort. This tool, dubbed AI-enabled Quantum Refinement, or AQuaRef for short, uses quantum-mechanical calculations (QM) and artificial intelligence (AI) to predict the highly-accurate placement of atoms and electrons to determine a protein’s molecular structure.

This program is a part of Phenix, a comprehensive software suite that generates realistic computer models used by structural biologists around the world to solve macromolecular structures. “We’re all basically a bunch of proteins,” said Nigel Moriarty, a Berkeley Lab researcher and contributor to the recent publication. “They do so much in our bodies that detail the processes of life. Understanding their structure can give us insights into the mechanisms that cause disease in humans or produce energy in plants. All of this knowledge can lead to more effective therapeutics and bioenergy production.”

The current way of mapping a protein’s structure entails bringing together two streams of information: experimental data produced through techniques like X-ray crystallography and cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM), and theoretical data that exists in a library of detailed, known protein structural information. But the current options are limited, explained Moriarty, a computational research scientist in the Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging (MBIB) Division’s Phenix group. Our understanding today is limited to the chemical entities that have already been defined and doesn’t yet include meaningful noncovalent interactions, the type of attraction typically seen holding a protein in its structural form. “That’s where quantum and AI come in,” he said.

Nearly five years ago, members of the Phenix team began working with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to explore how they might be able to apply their coding work to Phenix’s offerings. The collaborative approach, coupled with 15 years of incremental research, led to this breakthrough program. In addition to Moriarty, other members of the Phenix team involved in this work were Paul Adams and Billy Poon, with Pavel Afonine leading the research. AQuaRef uses machine learning (ML) tools developed at Carnegie Mellon integrated with the Phenix software to compute energy and forces for scientifically interesting proteins—making quantum-level refinement practical where it was previously impossible.

Of the 71 experiments that were tested in this study, AQuaRef produced higher quality structural information at a substantially lower computational cost while maintaining an equal or better fit to experimental data. In addition to the proof-of-concept results from this work, AQuaRef also correctly determined proton positions in DJ-1, a human protein linked to some forms of Parkinson’s Disease, the structure of which has been notoriously difficult to map. Now that the team has confirmed that quantum-level refinement of a 3D protein model structure is possible, they’re aiming to broaden the scope to include more diverse structures, such as those required for pharmaceutical drug design. And the potential impacts of this work reach far beyond human health, from better understanding the mechanisms of photosynthesis for enhanced crop productivity to mapping the proteins in plants as it relates to biofuel production.

“There is a near-infinite number of things that can benefit from a detailed understanding of these mechanisms and protein structure,” said Moriarty. “I’m excited to see how the paradigm shift that AQuaRef represents impacts the field of protein structure determination.”

This international team also included collaborators from the University of Wrocław, Poland, the University of Florida, and Pending.AI, Australia.

This work was funded by the National Institutes of Health as well as with support from the Phenix Industrial Consortium.

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Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.

Newswise — Five faculty members from Georgia Tech have been elected as senior members of the National Academy of Inventors (NAI). As members, they are recognized as distinguished academic inventors with a strong record of patenting technologies, licensing IP, and commercializing their research. Their innovations have made, or have the potential to make, meaningful impacts on society. 

 “The election of our faculty members to this prestigious association is a powerful affirmation of the innovative research happening at Georgia Tech,” said Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, chief commercialization officer at Georgia Tech. “Their work to take research to market reflects the growing importance of invention in addressing society’s most complex challenges. This recognition signals the strength of the commercialization ecosystem at Georgia Tech to advance impactful research, encourage innovation, and prepare the next generation of inventors.” 

The 2026 Georgia Tech NAI senior members are: 

• Jason David Azoulay, associate professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering School and School of Chemistry and Biochemistry
• Jaydev Prataprai Desai, professor and cardiovascular biomedical engineering distinguished chair, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
• David Frost, Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor and Regents’ Entrepreneur, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Chandra Raman, Dunn Family Professor of Physics, School of Physics
• Aaron Young, associate professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Jason David Azoulay

Azoulay is recognized for pioneering new classes of functional materials through innovative polymer synthesis, heterocycle chemistry, and polymerization reactions. His work spans electronic, photonic, and quantum materials, device fabrication, and chemical sensing for environmental monitoring. He has demonstrated new classes of organic semiconductors with infrared functionality and holds nine issued U.S. patents. Azoulay is the Georgia Research Alliance Vasser-Woolley Distinguished Investigator and holds a joint appointment in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. 

Jaydev Prataprai Desai

Desai is recognized for advancing medical robotics and translational biomedical innovation with inventions spanning robotically steerable guidewires for endovascular interventions, minimally invasive surgical tools, MEMS sensors for cancer diagnosis, and rehabilitation robotics for people with motor impairments. He is the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, has authored more than 225 peer-reviewed publications, and serves as the Director of Georgia Center for Medical Robotics at Georgia Tech. Desai holds 16 U.S. and International patents.  

David Frost

Frost has built a career at the intersection of civil engineering research and entrepreneurship. A leader in the study of natural and human-made disasters and their impacts on infrastructure, he has founded two Georgia Tech-based software companies: Dataforensics, which offers tools for subsurface data collection and infrastructure project management, and Filio, an AI-powered mobile platform that supports visual asset management in construction and post-disaster reconnaissance. In 2023, Frost was named a Regents’ Entrepreneur by the University System of Georgia’s Board of Regents, a designation reserved for tenured faculty who have successfully taken their research into a commercial setting. He holds four U.S. patents.  

Chandra Raman

Raman is a physicist, inventor, and technology entrepreneur whose research on ultracold atoms is enabling a new generation of ultraprecise quantum sensing devices. He is the co-inventor of chip-scale atomic beam technology — a breakthrough that makes it possible to miniaturize quantum sensors for navigation and timing applications in environments where GPS fails, with uses spanning autonomous vehicles, aerospace, and national security. Raman holds six U.S. patents, three of which have been issued and two licensed. To bring his inventions to market, he founded 8Seven8 Inc., Georgia’s first quantum hardware company. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and an advisor to national and space-based quantum initiatives. 

Aaron Young

Young directs the Exoskeleton and Prosthetic Intelligent Controls Lab, where he develops robotic exoskeletons and intelligent control systems to improve walking function and physical capability for people with mobility impairments and industrial safety applications. His research has been supported by major federal grants from the National Institutes of Health, and he holds three U.S. patents. Young works with Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and Quadrant-i to advance promising technologies toward real-world adoption. 

About Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization 

The Office of Commercialization is the nexus of research commercialization and entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech, bringing leading-edge research and innovation to market. It comprises six key units — ATDC, CREATE-X, VentureLab, Quadrant-i, Technology Licensing, and Velocity Startups — that empower students and faculty to launch startups, manage intellectual property, and transform research ideas into positive societal impact. Learn more at commercialization.gatech.edu. 

About the National Academy of Inventors 

The National Academy of Inventors is a member organization comprising U.S. and international universities, and governmental and nonprofit research institutes, with over 4,000 individual inventor members and fellows spanning more than 250 institutions worldwide. It was founded in 2010 to recognize and encourage inventors with patents issued from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, enhance the visibility of academic technology and innovation, and translate the inventions of its members to benefit society. Learn more at academyofinventors.org. 

Newswise — From brightly colored textile dyes to persistent pesticides and antibiotics, many modern pollutants dissolved in water — such as Bisphenol A — resist traditional treatment methods. A promising approach uses electricity to power chemical reactions in water over an electrode surface. Much like in a battery, electrodes send and receive electrical current that drives chemical reactions.

This process, known as electrocatalysis, generates a class of highly reactive oxygen-containing compounds, known as reactive oxygen species or oxidants, at the electrode surface. These powerful oxidants, which include ozone and hydrogen peroxide, can break down even the most stubborn contaminants, producing cleaner water. However, because these oxygen species are unstable, degrade over time and exist in trace amounts — down to the parts-per-billion level — they have been notoriously difficult to detect and quantify.

In a study published in ACS Catalysis, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory report a new method for detecting and quantifying these short-lived oxygen species in real time with unprecedented sensitivity. Their approach revealed not only how much of each oxidant is produced, but also which specific species are formed under different treatment conditions.

“These oxygen species don’t last long, and they’re hard to detect individually,” said Argonne Electrochemist Scientist Pietro Papa Lopes, who led the study. ​“But knowing which ones are present and in what quantities is essential for improving water treatment technologies.”

Importantly, the team’s findings have applications beyond water treatment. One example is fuel cells. They convert hydrogen or other chemical fuels into electricity. Another is electrolyzers. They can split water molecules to produce hydrogen fuel or convert carbon dioxide into aviation fuels, for example.

The researchers used a method involving two electrodes to determine which oxidants were generated at the electrode surface. The first was a disk where a water oxidation reaction took place, generating the reactive oxygen species. The second was a concentric ring electrode. It produced an electrical signal that could detect and quantify the reactive oxygen species.

They tested the performance of three materials as the disk electrode: lead dioxide, platinum and iridium oxide. Lead dioxide was selected for its known ability to generate significant amounts of ozone and relevance to pollutant degradation. Platinum and iridium oxide were included as controls, as earlier studies had suggested they do not produce measurable amounts of reactive oxygen species. But the results told a different story.

“Somewhat to our surprise, at high voltages, all three electrode materials produced measurable levels of hydrogen peroxide and ozone,” said Papa Lopes. ​“That finding matters. Those oxidants can degrade membranes and other components used in electrochemical technologies, which could impact their long-term performance.”

Another key result involved Faradaic efficiency — a measure of how much input electricity is converted into useful chemical products. The team found that lead dioxide converted up to 30% of the electrical energy into ozone. That’s a high efficiency for systems of this type and suggests strong potential for scalable pollutant breakdown technologies.

The study provides a new benchmark for scientists and engineers working to advance electrochemical water purification. By establishing a consistent, sensitive method for identifying and quantifying reactive oxygen species in electrochemical systems, the research enables better system design and more meaningful comparisons across experiments and technologies.

This work was conducted through the Advanced Materials for Energy-Water Systems (AMEWS) Center, an Energy Frontier Research Center led by Argonne and supported by DOE. AMEWS seeks to understand how water — and the substances it carries — interacts with solid materials at the molecular level.

In addition to Papa Lopes, contributing authors at Argonne include Igor Messias, Jacob Kupferberg, Askley Bielinski and Alex Martinson, as well as Raphael Nagao at the Universidade Estadual de Campinas in Brazil. The research was funded by the DOE Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology by conducting leading-edge basic and applied research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

Newswise — Imagine descending nearly a mile and a half into a watery abyss, watching the sunlight disappear as the world around you turns completely black. Then suddenly, you find yourself surrounded by a shower of brilliant, bioluminescent fireworks.

This is just the beginning of an ocean expedition into the realm of deep-sea hydrothermal vents — alien ecosystems teeming with life we have yet to fully understand. Here, a place where the sunlight never reaches, crabs, rays and fish thrive even under the extreme hydrostatic pressure.

A team of intrepid researchers from Arizona State University embarked on a recent journey to these hidden depths to learn more about nitrogen cycling and the microbial life thriving in these extreme conditions. These microscopic organisms play a vital role in the ocean’s delicate chemistry.

“I think the deep sea is one of the final frontiers of exploration on Earth,” said Carolynn Harris, a postdoctoral researcher in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. “We know more about the surface of the moon than we know about the bottom of the ocean on our own planet.”

Sheryl Murdock, a postdoctoral research scholar with ASU’s School of Ocean Futures, part of the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory, led the expedition along with Elizabeth Trembath-Reichert, an associate professor with the School of Earth and Space Exploration. Six ASU students and staff participated, working on everything from taking samples and planning the next day’s dive, to testing equipment and leading the team’s experiments and school outreach.

Murdock and her research team are working to understand exactly what the smallest inhabitants of the ocean are contributing to ocean chemistry. While microbes are tiny, they have a tremendous impact, and Murdock says they’re not something that gets thought about often when it comes to protecting and managing the ocean.

“Nobody’s going to buy the ‘save the microbes’ bumper sticker,” Murdock said. “We need the public to know that the way the chemistry of the ocean stays in balance has loads to do with microbes and how they cycle nitrogen and other chemical elements. And by understanding what microbes contribute, we can learn how that plays into the wider ocean chemistry and, importantly, ocean health.”

One way the researchers learn more is by taking samples of microbes that thrive under deep-sea pressure — gathered from water and sediment samples. But this team is trying something that has never been done before.

“We are working to understand the microbes living in tubeworm communities by sampling the fluids and then bringing the water back onto the ship, running incubations, and looking at how those microbes use different sources of nitrogen,” Murdock said. “What’s novel about this is bringing them to the surface but keeping them under seafloor pressure and running experiments at that high pressure.”

This process is difficult at best. The team must travel far out to sea on a ship called the R/V Atlantis — a U.S. Navy-owned research vessel operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. This ship is designed specifically to launch Alvin, a specialized “human occupied vehicle,” or HOV, used by researchers to explore the deep sea.

Once the team reached its final destination in the Pacific northwest — a spreading center between tectonic plates called the Juan de Fuca Ridge — the team performed multiple dives in the submersible, as weather conditions allowed.

Their innovative approach to collecting water, sediment and microbial samples — bringing them to the surface under the same pressure — is expected to bring new insights to our understanding of ocean chemistry, what roles microbes play on the seafloor, and how they contribute to ecosystem health and function.

Ship to shore: Bringing deep-sea exploration to the classroom

Beyond the scientific breakthroughs, the expedition sparked a wave of inspiration among hundreds of students back on land. The cruise carried a dedicated outreach team — responsible for a ship-to-shore “virtual field trip” program that brought live video, interviews and demonstrations into classrooms thousands of miles away.

Will Carter, an outreach coordinator with the ASU Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, or BIOS, helped build the pipeline.

“We had a full Zoom setup,” Carter said, describing a dizzying array of gear: a handheld gimbal and iPhone for roaming footage, a 360 conference camera to show a room, and microphones that had to survive both wind and poor bandwidth. “You can imagine with all of these different tech elements, especially being on a ship where there’s limited Wi-Fi, it took a long time to really set up and master.”

Carter, who has a background in biology and media studies, edited dive footage each night and crafted short, punchy videos for the next day’s calls. Their goal was modest at first — reach a few hundred students — but the appetite for real-time science grew fast.

For students at Osborne Middle School in Phoenix, the experience wasn’t a distant slideshow. Science teacher Jim Hess watched his seventh and eighth graders press toward the screen, leaning in to see hydrothermal chimneys and hear Alvin crew explain life in a tin can at the bottom of the world.

“They decorated Styrofoam cups before the team left to go to the boat,” Hess said. The cups were taken down on the outside of the submersible; at 2,300 meters (more than six Empire State Buildings) deep, the air is crushed out of the foam. “Your regular six-inch Styrofoam cup shrinks down to about the size of your thumb,” he told students. The cups were returned as tiny souvenirs — a reminder that sometimes science is a tactile thrill as much as it is data.

Middle schoolers asked the questions adults skip. 

“How do you use the bathroom?” one asked. And the answer — “you try to go before, and if not, then you go on this little red bedpan” — produced exactly the reaction the outreach team wanted: awe and laughter, followed by curiosity. 

“Those middle school questions,” Carter said, “are perfect.”

From the beginning, the ship-to-shore goal was simple but ambitious: bring real impact and working science directly to students in real time, as discovery is unfolding live.

“We knew to get this over the goal line, it couldn’t just be creating a curriculum module,” said Kaitlin Noyes, director of education and community engagement at ASU BIOS. “It needed to be something bigger.” 

That “something bigger” became a series of live broadcasts from the research vessel and the submersible using special communications tools, connecting students from third grade through college — and even professional educators — to science, as it was happening at sea.

Over the course of the two-week expedition, they hosted 29 live shows and reached 857 participants.

“A lot of these kids have never had interaction with anything outside of their immediate area,” Hess said. “They hear about ASU, but they don’t really know what that means. This shows them the world is bigger — and that they can be part of it.”

From under the sea to under the microscope

Back on deck, the science had its own setbacks: rough weather grounded dives, forcing the team to compress their goals into fewer opportunities. Harris described how team dynamics became essential in cramped, chilly, sometimes seasick conditions.

“Anytime you take a group of people and put them in a confined, isolated situation, the group dynamics are so important,” she said. “We had a quarter fewer dives than we had hoped, but we still accomplished all of our major science objectives.”

Now the team’s samples — including water, sediments and microbes — will be analyzed. The next phase will take time and precision: sequencing DNA from microbes, measuring nitrogen species and piecing together how these unseen organisms move nutrients through a world without sunlight.

As the team measures the samples over the next several months, the researchers share a message: The deep sea is not a desolate wasteland but a vibrant ecosystem facing unprecedented threats due to climate impacts, overfishing and bottom-trawling, pollution and potential deep-sea mining.

“Industrialization of the deep sea is really knocking at the door,” Murdock said. “Our research is but one important step to reaching a better understanding of how our ocean works, and by doing that, we hope to contribute to strategies that ensure future ocean health.”

Corpses leave clues behind in the soil long after they’re gone

ASU research has potential to help forensic teams solve cases when a victim’s body has been moved

Newswise — President’s Professor Pamela Marshall (left) and Assistant Professor Katelyn Bolhofner pose with soil samples in one of their labs on Thursday, Feb. 19, on the West Valley campus. The researchers analyze the microbial and chemical traces left behind when remains are moved, uncovering patterns of postmortem change that can guide forensic investigations. Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU News.  Download article assets

 It is not uncommon for a body to be moved after a murder, usually to hide or eliminate evidence.

And while the Arizona desert may seem like the perfect place to commit such a crime, a new study shows that a cadaver can still leave critical clues behind in that harsh environment.

Arizona State University researchers have found that trace elements linger at an original dump site even after an extensive amount of time. These elements can provide insights into postmortem processes, helping forensic investigators uncover clandestine burials and relocate the remains of murder victims.

“A lot of times a murderer will kill someone and put the body somewhere, stash it, panic and then move it. And how can you ever trace where they have done this?” said Assistant Professor Katelyn Bolhofner with the School of Interdisciplinary Forensics, who collaborated with President’s Professor Pam Marshall from the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences on the study.

“The surprising result was that even with the hot Arizona summer, we could still tell that there had been something that was dying and decomposing in that spot in the desert,” Bolhofner said.

Uncovering signatures in the soil

Prior to the study, Bolhofner and Marshall believed that any evidence on the original site of a transported body would be baked under Arizona’s scorching summer sun.

That was far from the case.

The study used two 200-pound pig models that were dressed up in jeans and a button-up shirt by students, since murder victims are commonly clothed. They were left to decompose in large cages (to keep scavenging animals away) in various environments and seasons in the Sonoran Desert.

After 25 days, the remains were moved to a secondary burial location. Then, over a period of nine months, the researchers tested the soil where the model was originally placed, where it was moved and in a location adjacent to the original burial as a control.

“It’s a multifaceted, year-round project to try to determine timing, insects involved, and the humidity and the temperature and many other of these factors,” Bolhofner said.

What they found were distinct microbial fingerprints where death gave way to new life — bacteria and fungi that once lived inside or on the body and were released into the surrounding ground as decomposition occurred.

“It turned out to be a really crazy finding,” Bolhofner said. “It’s like the murder victim is leaving a signature of themselves in death … almost like leaving breadcrumbs right around the desert (indicating) that they had been there, and those breadcrumbs stayed there in the soil, invisible to the naked eye for a year.”

“No one has ever done an experiment like this,” Marshall said. “It was unique because no one had looked at a dumped body that was then moved. It was also unusual because no one’s been looking at the Sonoran Desert.”

It’s like the murder victim is leaving a signature of themselves in death … almost like leaving breadcrumbs right around the desert.

Kaitlyn BolhofnerAssistant professor of forensics

Counting on collaboration

The study was a collective and collaborative effort.

ASU graduate Jennifer Matta Salinas worked on the study for her honors thesis. She collected and processed the data, and extracted DNA for the study.

“I felt like my results definitely opened the door to a novel area of forensic science that has many avenues to explore and to still verify,” said Salinas, who earned a bachelor’s degree in forensic science. “I’m hoping someday it is used to help find someone’s loved ones months or years after their disappearance no matter where the environment is.”

The DNA was then prepped and analyzed by Kristina Buss in ASU’s Bioinformatics Facility and Desert Southwest Genomics Center, and Teaching Professor Ken G. Sweat performed the chemical analysis of the soil.

“We here in the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences and the School of Interdisciplinary Forensics are very collaborative — we depend on each other,” Marshall said. “Without Jennifer needing to write her thesis, this wouldn’t have happened. Without Ken doing the elemental analysis, that part wouldn’t have happened either.”

Future forensic potential

Stuart Somershoe, a retired police detective with the Phoenix Police Department’s missing-persons division, was also a part of the project.

According to the World Population Review, Arizona has one of the highest number of missing persons in the nation, with more than 1,000 people missing and 1,588 resolved cases in 2025.

Somershoe says the desert plays into those statistics. He sees the potential application of this study in cold cases and missing persons cases both now and in the future.

“I read the study and could see the value in police investigations,” Somershoe said. “It would certainly be something that could be used.”

Somershoe said that as this research develops and becomes more well-known, it could become a technique as commonly used as DNA testing.

But first, more experiments and studies will be needed.

“We’re way in our infancy,” Marshall said.

The researchers are interested in taking the study on the road to see if the findings can be confirmed in other climates, but Marshall is hopeful.

“This study is really specific to this climate and this landscape and this geography,” Marshall said. “Our soil and our climate (are) so harsh and so odd. The fact that this can be proven here should show that in other climates, it’s much more doable. Those climates are much friendlier.”

The researchers also plan to verify that human remains would yield similar results.

“We need to confirm that the things we’re seeing in pigs are the same in humans,” she said. “We need to figure out how what we have discovered is transferable.”

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Newswise — Exhaustion creeps in. Appetite vanishes. Hair thins. The person in the mirror looks gaunt. It’s the paradox of cancer treatment: The same drugs meant to save a life can also wear the body down.

Nick Housley, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences, wants to change that. He studies where cancer drugs go once they’re inside the body, including places they were never intended to reach. Some of the medicine finds the tumor. The rest interacts with healthy tissue.

This approach has saved millions of lives. It can also create punishing side effects.

“The problem isn’t that these drugs don’t work,” said Housley. “It’s that they affect far more of the body than they need to.”

When Chemistry Does the Work

Cancer cells consume oxygen and nutrients at a higher rate than healthy tissue, and that changes the environment around a tumor. In a recent Nature Communications paper, Housley and his team introduced a drug delivery system that senses those physical changes and guides medicine to the disease. The drug is released only when it encounters those tumor-specific conditions.

Housley’s system is designed to work across many cancer types. Rather than being tailored to a specific tumor type or genetic marker, the system is “cancer agnostic.”

“We don’t need to know anything about the tumor ahead of time,” said Housley. “These particles circulate through the body, but they persist where tumors create those conditions.”

The Whack-a-Mole Problem

Housley’s design sidesteps a constant challenge in cancer treatment. Tumors are not static. They change in response to pressure from therapy, creating what Housley describes as “a whack-a-mole problem”, where hitting one target can push the disease to reemerge in a different form.

“Tumors are constantly changing,” said Housley. “You hit one thing with a targeted therapy, and that pressure causes the tumor to evolve. That’s a big problem with classically targeted therapies.”

“It has the potential to be a breakthrough at the clinic…patients in early trials could benefit directly; that’s rare and exciting.” –Nick Housley

Letting the Body Lead

Housley’s drug delivery system is called SANGs, short for “self-assembling nanohydrogels.” Nanohydrogels are microscopic, gel-like particles designed to carry drugs through the bloodstream. As the nanohydrogels circulate, they keep the drug contained. The particles pass through healthy tissue without releasing medicine. When they encounter the environment created by a tumor, they linger and release the drug where it’s needed most.

In preclinical studies, the nanohydrogels did what they were designed to do. They circulated through the body without releasing the drug too early, responding to tumor-specific conditions and concentrating treatment at the disease site.

Moving Toward Patients

Housley and his team are now planning to test SANGs with additional drugs and across a wider range of cancers, laying the groundwork for human clinical trials.

“The moment we can get our first patient in the study, the moment we can collect that first data and begin to see what this really changes, that will be a big moment,” he said.

Cancer treatment is physically taxing, but it also forces people into what Housley describes as “a constant calculus — weighing time gained against what that time will feel like.”

The goal isn’t to remove uncertainty from cancer care. It’s to narrow the impact of treatment, so patients aren’t forced to sacrifice how they feel for how long they live.

Newswise — Near-field optical trapping has transformed particle manipulation in biology, chemistry, and nanotechnology, enabling contact-free control of objects ranging from nanoparticles to living cells. However, most existing whispering-gallery-mode and waveguide-based platforms rely on evanescent fields that penetrate only about 100 nanometers into the surrounding medium. This shallow interaction region restricts trapping efficiency and makes the system highly sensitive to perturbations caused by trapped particles themselves. Such instability limits practical applications requiring dense, large-area, or long-term manipulation. Given these challenges, it is necessary to develop optical trapping strategies that achieve deeper field penetration, stronger light–matter interaction, and greater robustness against particle-induced disturbances.

Researchers from Fudan University and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University report a new optical trapping platform in Microsystems & Nanoengineering, published (DOI: 10.1038/s41378-026-01167-7) in January 2026. The team demonstrates a gradient-thickness-protected microbottle resonator that enables large-scale, stable optical trapping via whispering-gallery modes. By introducing a controlled wall-thickness gradient into a hollow microbottle geometry, the device supports high-order axial modes that generate multiple optical trapping sites along its length. This design allows particles to be trapped efficiently over nearly 200 micrometers with ultralow optical power.

The core innovation lies in the microbottle resonator’s gradient wall thickness, which is thinnest at the equator and gradually thickens toward both ends. This geometry fundamentally changes how optical fields are distributed inside the resonator. Instead of confining particles to weak evanescent fields near the surface, the device generates strong optical-field antinodes that extend several micrometers into the liquid core, creating deep, stable trapping potentials.

The researchers show that this configuration supports high-order axial whispering-gallery modes, forming dozens of discrete trapping “orbits” along the resonator axis. Experiments demonstrate stable trapping of 500-nanometer-radius polystyrene particles across an axial span exceeding 195 micrometers, far larger than that of most near-field platforms. Remarkably, the trapping threshold power is only 0.198 milliwatts, highlighting the system’s energy efficiency.

Equally important, the gradient-thickness design protects the strongest optical fields by confining them within the silica wall at the resonator ends. This minimizes degradation of the optical quality factor when particles are trapped, ensuring consistent performance even during large-scale, multi-particle manipulation. The platform also supports localized, tunable trapping via standing-wave excitation, enabling precise repositioning of individual particles.

“This work shows that optical trapping performance is not only about stronger lasers, but about smarter structures,” the researchers note. “By engineering the resonator geometry, we can control where optical energy resides and how it interacts with particles.” They emphasize that isolating the peak optical fields from particle-induced perturbations is key to achieving robust and scalable trapping. The approach, they suggest, bridges the gap between laboratory demonstrations and practical optofluidic systems capable of handling complex, real-world samples.

The gradient-thickness microbottle resonator opens new possibilities for high-throughput and label-free particle manipulation. Its extended trapping range and multiple stable orbits make it suitable for parallel single-cell analysis, bioparticle sorting, and real-time monitoring of microbial dynamics. The rapid orbital motion of trapped particles can also enhance micromixing, potentially accelerating biochemical reactions in microfluidic environments. Beyond biology, the platform may enable advanced sensing, targeted drug delivery, and reconfigurable optofluidic devices. More broadly, the study highlights how geometric design can unlock new regimes of light–matter interaction, offering a versatile blueprint for next-generation optical manipulation technologies.

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References

DOI

10.1038/s41378-026-01167-7

Original Source URL

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-026-01167-7

Funding information

This work was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 62175035, X.W.), Natural Science Foundation of Shanghai (grant no. 21ZR1407400 X.W.), Hong Kong Research Grant Council/University Grants Committee (grant no. 21203724, L.K.C.) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (Global STEM Professorship BDA8, A.-Q.L.).

About Microsystems & Nanoengineering

Microsystems & Nanoengineering is an online-only, open access international journal devoted to publishing original research results and reviews on all aspects of Micro and Nano Electro Mechanical Systems from fundamental to applied research. The journal is published by Springer Nature in partnership with the Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences, supported by the State Key Laboratory of Transducer Technology.

Newswise — WASHINGTON, March 3, 2026 — When you reach the bottom of a container of milk or honey, you might be tempted to tip the container over to get that last pesky little bit out. After all, you only need another teaspoon for that recipe, and you’re sure it’s in there!

In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from Brown University present two related studies about thin film fluid flows in the kitchen: one about the relationship between how long it takes to tip the remaining liquid out of a container and its viscosity, and the other about the ideal time to wait before dumping water out of a wok to minimize rusting — it’s more effective to wait a few minutes to let the water accumulate so there’s more to pour out.

“The kitchen is sort of the prime laboratory,” said author Jay Tang. “It deals with a lot of chemistry, materials science, and physics.”

Most people have an intuitive sense of what viscosity is, often described as how thick a fluid feels. It is measured scientifically by applying a certain amount of force to a fluid and measuring its flow rate.

“If you want to empty a jar of water — a few brief seconds, and you have very little left. But if you try to empty a jar of honey, you need to wait longer,” said author Thomas Dutta. “How much longer? The viscosity can tell us.”

By measuring various examples, the researchers derived an exact equation for this flow. A particularly sustainable person can use this to decide how long to wait to collect 99% of what remains in their jar — but for most people, the intuitive understanding that something viscous, like honey or syrup, takes longer than water does will suffice.

“This tipping thing used to happen in my home when I was a kid,” said Dutta. “My grandma would do it with oil bottles or condensed milk.”

The same principle applies to drying out a wok. After washing and dumping out the initial water, Dutta and Tang calculated the ideal amount of time one should allow the remaining water to reaccumulate at its bottom before dumping it again — too long, and it will rust, but too short, and not enough of the water will pool. Figuring out just the right amount of time relies, unsurprisingly, on the viscosity of water. The answer: a few minutes.

“We use these common household examples to really try to show people in a quantitative way that these are all thin film fluid flow, and we can use fluid mechanics to calculate and predict and reliably estimate things,” said Tang. “The things people handle on a daily basis have a lot of physics behind them.”

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The article “Thin film flow in the kitchen” is authored by Thomas T. Dutta and Jay X. Tang. It will appear in Physics of Fluids on March 3, 2026 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0308586). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0308586.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Physics of Fluids is devoted to the publication of original theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions to the dynamics of gases, liquids, and complex fluids. See https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pof.

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Newswise — Polymers are fundamental to our daily lives, serving as the core components for a wide array of goods, including clothing, packaging, transportation infrastructure, construction materials and electronics. Advances in polymer science open pathways for recycling and upcycling waste materials into more valuable chemical feedstocks. They also can have an outsized environmental impact: many widely used polymers are Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS), widely recognized as “forever chemicals.”

In a pioneering partnership to accelerate materials discovery with artificial intelligence (AI), researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Meta have created the world’s largest open dataset of atomistic polymer chemistry — a trove of millions of quantum-accurate simulations designed to help AI model the complex behavior of plastics, films, batteries and countless everyday materials.

In a recent paper, the team details Open Polymers 2026 (OPoly26) – a dataset with an unprecedented number and diversity of polymer structures with corresponding simulations performed at quantum accuracy. OPoly26 is a massive reference library that enables AI to learn patterns from millions of pre-computed polymer structures in hours or days, addressing a longstanding gap in polymer data and laying the foundation for safer, faster and more sustainable materials design. The OPoly26 paper formalizes the dataset’s release and demonstrates how the data improves the performance of machine-learned interatomic potentials (MLIPs) on polymer materials.

The work builds on the Meta and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)-led      Open Molecules 2025 (OMol25) Dataset, which is making waves with its sweeping collection of open molecular data aimed at advancing AI-driven chemistry. The OPoly26 dataset contains more than 6 million density functional theory (DFT) calculations on polymeric chemical systems, making it nearly ten times larger than the next largest comparable polymer dataset.

LLNL’s partnership with Meta — described by LLNL materials scientist and OPoly26 co-principal investigator (PI) Evan Antoniuk as a “natural fit” — seeks to address this shortfall. By generating critical missing data on polymers with the shared goals of expanding and democratizing open datasets for materials scientists, the team hopes to accelerate the pace of discovery across polymer chemistry.

“This fills a huge gap,” said Antoniuk. “We see this as a community resource, one that we hope becomes the go-to starting point for anyone interested in performing atomistic simulations of polymers.”

LLNL contributed significant computational power and polymer domain knowledge — generating a diverse set of polymer structures and running simulations to help model how these polymers behave in real-world conditions. In turn, Meta contributed vast computational resources to perform 1.2 billion core hours of DFT simulations and train state-of-the-art MLIP models, leveraging the expertise that had already been refined during their earlier molecular effort.

“Meta’s partnership with LLNL demonstrates how open science and AI can accelerate breakthroughs in materials research,” said Rob Sherman, vice president of policy at Meta. “By making this dataset publicly available, we’re giving scientists potent new tools to address critical challenges in healthcare and beyond.”

LLNL is uniquely positioned to generate the OPoly26 dataset at the scale and fidelity required. Researchers tapped into LLNL’s Tuolumne, the world’s 12^th fastest supercomputer and companion to the exascale El Capitan, leveraging this hardware with their collective expertise to compress years of simulation work into months and enabling the dataset to reach a scale unmatched in polymer science.

“Comprehensive coverage of this chemical space is essential to the success of the OPoly26 dataset,” said LLNL staff scientist Nick Liesen. “We have worked to leverage pipelines that take us from a simple text string to fully atomistic representations of polymer dynamics at scale.”

Beyond performing all the DFT calculations, researchers at Meta trained and benchmarked machine-learned interatomic potentials at scale, enabling the team to evaluate how well AI models generalize across small-molecule and polymer chemistry. The paper reports substantial improvements in model accuracy when polymer data is incorporated alongside small-molecule training sets, highlighting the importance of training AI on data that reflects real-world complexity.

Understanding why certain polymers, including PFAS-based materials, resist chemical change requires models that can accurately describe both reactive and nonreactive behavior. Capturing this behavior under realistic conditions required careful attention to reactive configurations, according to LBNL chemist and OPoly26 co-PI Sam Blau, who also previously co-led OMol25.

“Reactivity — the breakage and formation of chemical bonds — is central to polymer synthesis, manufacturing, aging and recycling, and to nanoscale patterning of polymer thin films for semiconductor manufacturing,” said Blau. “By going beyond stable structures and explicitly sampling hundreds of thousands of reactive configurations, we aim to accurately describe the reactive events that often govern polymer behavior under real-world conditions.”

Beyond outlining how the dataset was generated and performing standard tests of MLIP performance, the OPoly26 paper also introduces an initial suite of polymer-specific evaluation tasks to benchmark how effectively these models capture simulated polymer phenomena and interactions, such as polymer solvation. Future work will include evaluating the MLIP models against experimental measurements, offering a gauge of how well they can capture real-world polymer properties.

“LLNL’s significant investment in high-performance scientific computing and computational materials science capabilities have been critical to achieving the scale needed to cover many thousands of distinct chemical structures,” said LLNL Materials Science Division Leader Ibo Matthews. “That scale is essential not only for generating the data, but for rigorously evaluating how well AI models perform across the full range of polymer behaviors relevant to real-world applications.”

With a focus on open collaboration, the team is making all data publicly available to fuel polymer advancements across academia, industry and government. The authors also emphasized that OPoly26 is being released under an open license to maximize reuse and reproducibility. Through this open approach, the partnership ensures that the benefits of this public-private investment flow broadly across the entire research community.

The team includes LLNL scientists Brian Van Essen, James Diffenderfer, Helgi Ingolfsson and Supun Mohottalalage, and polymer simulation experts Amitesh Maiti and Matt Kroonblawd from the Lab’s Materials Science Division. Co-authors also included LBNL’s Nitesh Kumar and Lauren Chua. Blau and Kumar’s work was funded by the Center for High Precision Patterning Science (CHiPPS), while Chua was supported by her DOE Computational Sciences Graduate Fellowship. LLNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program funded the LLNL researchers.

This partnership was made possible through a data transfer agreement, facilitated by LLNL’s Innovation and Partnerships Office (IPO). IPO is the Laboratory’s focal point for industry engagement and facilitates partnerships to deliver mission-driven solutions that support national security and grow the U.S. economy. To connect with LLNL on industrial partnerships in Advanced Computing, AI and Quantum technologies, contact IPO Business Development Executive Clarence Cannon.