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 tel...

Scientists have successfully reprogrammed baker’s yeast cousin to manufacture cannabis compounds in a laboratory, potentially bypassing the need for acres of hemp plants and unpredictable growing seas...

The Chinese suanpan has been around for roughly 1,000 years. Slide a bead up, slide a bead down — each rod operates independently, and the number it represents depends only on where the beads sit. Break one rod and the rest carry on just fine. It is, in a sense, the world’s most fault-tolerant calculator. ... Read more

Light hits a particle of indium oxide, and something unusual happens. The palladium clusters dotting its surface don’t just absorb the photons. They convert them into heat, raising the catalyst’s skin temperature to around 230 degrees Celsius within seconds, even though the source of illumination is nothing more exotic than simulated sunlight. That warmth is ... Read more

From the roof of a teaching building at South China University of Technology, a beam of white light crossed 1,200 metres of open air and arrived, intact, at a receiver on the other side of the campus. Not a laser line, not a narrow coherent beam of the kind that demands precise alignment and makes ... Read more

When a defunct satellite spins out of control in Earth’s orbit, it becomes a deadly projectile threatening operational spacecraft. Now, Chinese researchers have developed an ingenious solution: flexib...

Most treatments for diabetic kidney disease aim to slow decline. Improvement is rare. Patients take their pills, track their numbers, and watch their kidney function gradually worsen despite therapy. ...

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 ...

A shifting center of gravity in scienceChina is moving toward parity with the United States in research leadership by a...

A droplet of treated wastewater falls thirty centimetres and strikes a thin plastic film. The impact lasts a fraction of a second. Fifteen LEDs flash on. This happens, over and over, inside a modest l...

Boiling water destroys things. That, more or less, is the assumption underlying decades of nanomedicine research, which has largely ignored traditional herbal teas and decoctions as sources of therapeutic nanoparticles. Lipid membranes, the reasoning went, simply don’t survive prolonged exposure to 100 degrees Celsius. They rupture. They disintegrate. And so researchers seeking plant-derived nanoparticles have ... Read more

A bat hanging from a cave ceiling is doing something that looks effortless but is, mechanically speaking, genuinely strange. It isn’t gripping. Not actively, anyway. When a bat lands inverted, its bod...

Every nerve fibre in your brain and spinal cord is wrapped in something a bit like electrical tape. The myelin sheath, as it’s called, is a fatty insulating layer produced by specialist cells called o...

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 ...