THE MICRONEEDLES dissolve within minutes, but not before they’ve done something conventional acne treatments struggle with: deliver three entirely different drugs exactly where they’re needed. One drug floats in water. Another repels it. The third sits somewhere between. For decades, that incompatibility has frustrated dermatologists trying to treat the 85 per cent of teenagers who … 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
Gene therapy just leapt past a barrier that’s held it back for years. Researchers in China have worked out how to pack oversized genes into the viral delivery vehicles that doctors use to treat genetic diseases, a trick that could unlock treatments for hundreds of conditions previously considered untreatable. The breakthrough centres on adeno-associated viruses, … 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
Families watching Alzheimer’s take hold have heard promises before. But what if the answer wasn’t a drug or surgery, but a sound—a low, steady drone at the pitch of a refrigerator hum? Inside a research lab in China, nine aged rhesus monkeys sat near speakers emitting 40-hertz tones for an hour each day. After just … Read more
Stroke patients grinding through repetitive arm exercises know the look: a therapist checking the clock, mentally calculating how many more patients need attention before shift end. That glance, however brief, changes the room. Healthcare systems worldwide are hemorrhaging staff faster than training programs can replace them, and researchers are asking whether machines might fill not … 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
Fusion plasmas have been hitting the same density wall for 40 years. Push the fuel concentration too high and the reactor fails within seconds, ending the shot in a cascade of instability. That empirical limit, known as the Greenwald density, has been one of fusion’s most frustrating constraints, because the denser the plasma, the more … Read more
An email lands in your inbox. The tone is familiar, the phrasing matches your manager’s style down to the occasional comma splice. It asks you to review a document on a shared drive. You click. By the time you realize the sender wasn’t your boss, your password is already logged on a server halfway across … Read more
Your brain does something remarkable when you drive through an intersection with faded lane markings. You fill in the gaps. The paint might be worn down to nothing, but you know where the lanes should run. Construction cones block half the view, but you can still picture the road underneath. Autonomous vehicles can’t do this. … Read more