Connecting Science and Society

Chemical reactions often demand precise control over their operating conditions to proceed efficiently. While chemists routinely use pH buffers to stabilise acidity levels, far less attention has been directed towards stabilising the electrochemical potential of solutions during oxidation–reduction reactions.
At Emory University, Dr Xinlin Lu, Dr Yurii Geletii, and Prof Craig Hill have pioneered a catalytic system that not only drives chemical reactions, but also acts as its own redox buffer. By automatically maintaining conditions optimal for electron transfers while converting malodorous thiols into odourless compounds, this innovation points to a new generation of catalysts that adjust themselves, delivering both efficiency and environmental benefits.

Avian necrotic enteritis (NE) is one of the most significant intestinal diseases affecting poultry worldwide, particularly broiler chickens. It causes major economic losses due to reduced growth rates, poor feed efficiency, and high mortality. The disease is caused by the bacterium Clostridium perfringens, specifically pathogenic type G strains. Dr Marie-Lou Gaucher from the Université de Montréal and her collaborators have been relentlessly studying ways to develop an effective vaccine against C. perfringens. Their promising findings may lead to innovative vaccination strategies and new methods to manage NE in poultry flocks.

Water resources are essential for human life. Knowing how to manage water, both now and in the future, is necessary to continue using it as well as possible. Nick Martin and Jeremy White are examining limitations to artificial intelligence applications in water resources generated from noisy and estimated data sets. For poor quality data sets, they found that machine learning models will perform poorly relative to tools that explicitly include physics-based descriptions of physical processes; this is because physics-based calculations can use both data and physics knowledge through data assimilation techniques.

Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy offers life-saving potential, particularly against blood cancers, but severe side effects such as cytokine release syndrome (CRS) limit its safety. These toxicities are linked to uncontrolled CAR expression levels on the T-cell surface. Led by Professor Abraham P. Lee, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have developed an advanced microfluidic system, called the Acoustic-Electric Shear Orbiting Poration (AESOP) platform, to precisely control the dose of genetic material delivered into primary T cells. This innovation promises safer, more homogeneous, and highly effective cellular immunotherapies.

Scientists have long debated where solar cycle magnetic fields come from—deep within its interior or closer to its surface. Compelling new evidence suggests these fields may originate much closer to the Sun’s visible surface than previously thought, with important implications for understanding our star’s complex magnetic behaviour. The Sun’s activity also holds important implications for exoplanets currently being discovered around many solar-like stars.

As the practice of psychotherapy increasingly embraces the spiritual dimensions of the human experience, therapists are investigating new ways to weave faith and meaning into healing. Dr Suzanne Coyle, a licensed pastoral counsellor and family therapist, explores the role of spirituality in psychotherapy and how this intersection can support the journey of healing. Her work provides practitioners with the tools and knowledge to integrate spirituality meaningfully into clinical practice.

Ohio Wesleyan University’s geological collection, which was amassed in Delaware, Ohio, USA, is among the oldest in America, but decades after those who assembled the collection retired and passed on, the collection fell into obscurity and its storage area was repurposed. Prof Loren Babcock, Director of the Orton Geological Museum at The Ohio State University, is leading a 3-year rescue project to stabilise, catalogue, and digitise more than 15,000 specimens. From rediscovered scientific-name-bearing type fossils to ethically sourced collections linked to abolitionist networks, the initiative promises not only to safeguard irreplaceable scientific material, but to revive a once overlooked foundation of American geology for future generations.

At University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, recent work by Professor Bo Song and colleagues suggests that light may play an unexpected role in the way our nerves use and transmit energy. Their research explores how mid-infrared photons, tiny packets of light released by chemical reactions inside nerve cells, might interact with the fatty myelin sheath tasked to insulate axons. Together, the studies propose a new view of biological communication —one that combines chemistry, physics, and quantum mechanics— to explain how the nervous system could use light to enhance energy efficiency and information transfer.

Physicists typically have two frameworks for considering mechanics – a classical picture, looking at larger-scale objects, or a quantum picture, considering things on a subatomic scale. Where the boundary between these two pictures lies is an open question. Dr Khaled Mnaymeh from National Research Council Canada and Carleton University argues that this boundary does not exist. Through his analysis of Bell’s inequality, configuration space, and counterfactual definiteness, his work highlights the importance of considering these foundational principles in our study of the world around us.

Category 5 hurricanes, financial crashes, and global pandemics are just a few examples of rare events whose high risks necessitate understanding and mitigation. Developments in artificial intelligence (AI) could go a long way towards improving our ability to model and mitigate the impacts of such extreme events, but current training methods are often unable to deal effectively with outliers in data – which is exactly what extreme events are. If outliers are present in training data, they skew the AI’s expectations, but if they’re omitted entirely, models will wrongly assume they never occur. To address this shortcoming, the Photrek team, led by Dr Kenric Nelson, has developed a new training technique to design more robust AI systems that can cope with rare, extreme events.