Somewhere in a Japanese port, a shipping container hums. Inside it, a stack of ceramic wafers, each thinner than a credit card, is converting natural gas directly into electricity without combustion, without turbines, without the thermodynamic waste that haunts conventional power plants. The device is a solid oxide fuel cell, and at roughly 55 per … Read more
Two adjacent fields in Jiangxi Province, China, grow different crops — one peanuts, one rice. The soils beneath them look similar enough: both acidic, both fertilised at similar rates, both collected from the same shallow depth. Mix biochar into either of them and you’d expect a broadly similar result. You’d be wrong. A new study … Read more
The Battambang bat caves draw tourists from around the world. Each evening, thousands of bats pour from the limestone cliffs in swirling clouds, a spectacle that fills the Cambodian sky. What visitors don’t see is the invisible cargo these flying mammals carry, a sprawling viral universe that researchers are only beginning to map. Between 2020 … Read more
In a laboratory at Nanjing Agricultural University, a common soil fungus is doing something chemical engineers have struggled with for decades. Aspergillus niger, the same organism that helps ferment soy sauce and produces citric acid for fizzy drinks, is quietly dissolving phosphorus from one of the world’s most problematic industrial wastes. The waste is phosphogypsum, … Read more
Eight million tonnes of cigarette butts are tossed onto streets and into bins worldwide each year. Most decompose glacially slowly, leaching toxins as they go. But what if this ubiquitous waste could power your phone? Researchers in China have transformed discarded cigarette filters into carbon supercapacitors with performance that rivals commercial activated carbon. The trick … Read more
For years, the price of clean hydrogen has stubbornly remained three to five times higher than the carbon-heavy version made from natural gas. That gap has kept the hydrogen economy theoretical rather than practical. A new solar-powered system that replaces half the chemistry in water splitting has just closed that gap entirely, producing green hydrogen … Read more
The acrid smell of wildfire smoke is unmistakable. It stings the eyes, coats the lungs, and lingers for days after flames move on. But the visible haze drifting from burning forests and grasslands tells only part of the story. Hidden within that smoke is a sprawling chemical arsenal that scientists have systematically undercounted for decades. … Read more
Behind every quick EV top up, the power grid is working harder than most drivers ever realize. In a new experimental modeling study published August 25 2025 in the journal Green Energy and Intelligent Transportation (Beijing Institute of Technology Press), Nitin Kumar Saxena of Teerthanker Mahaveer University in India and David Wenzhong Gao of the … Read more
A gentle hillside in southern China hides the vast wound of an ancient collision, reminding us how suddenly the sky can rearrange the Earth. In a new study published in Matter and Radiation at Extremes, researchers from Shanghai and Guangzhou confirm that the Jinlin crater in Guangdong Province is the largest known impact structure from … Read more
Light bulbs have changed a lot since Edison, yet few could be mistaken for wallpaper. Now, researchers in China have engineered a light-emitting diode (LED) so thin it could roll onto your wall like a sticker—and it glows with a sunlike warmth. The breakthrough, published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces, could transform how we … Read more