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China's top state-run research institution, overseeing hundreds of institutes spanning natural sciences, engineering, and space research.
Chinese researchers assessed 10,826 wastewater plants and found reuse pays for itself and eases water stress for only about 450 million people today. Their modeling says mixing centralized and decentralized treatment would meet national targets at 25% to 37% lower infrastructure cost.
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Sustained confinement stopped amoeboid cancer cells migrating and triggered necroptosis in 3D lab models, a Developmental Cell paper reports. The authors say the protein MLKL, which triggers that death, could become a biomarker for metastasis risk.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers built a 3D atlas of rice gene activity spanning 10 organs and 61 developmental stages, they report in Cell. Its seed-signaling results are predictions, offered as candidates for further experiments.
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Istanbul Technical University-led geologists date a previously unrecognized magmatic arc in northwestern Iran to about 101-97 million years ago. The Geoscience Frontiers study gives reconstructions of how the Neo-Tethys Ocean closed a dated subduction episode that earlier accounts of the region had missed.
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Global fire incidents fell 12.3% in the first half of 2020 as lockdowns kept people home, a study in Cell Reports Sustainability finds. Its authors take the countries that burned more as evidence that people put fires out as well as start them.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers report a cobalt-manganese catalyst that converted nearly 83% of carbon monoxide from wood-based syngas in testing. So far the case for cheaper fuel rests on one producer's profit projection, and no price has been published for the airlines that would buy the fuel.
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Armed conflict cut cropland within 5 km of fighting by 3.01% on average across 155 countries, a Chinese Academy of Sciences team reports in Nature Food. Losses lasted for years and hit about a third of cropland where clashes were most frequent, so food-security budgets should not assume a quick rebound.
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South China University of Technology researchers used plasma to grow 0.8-2.5 nm precipitates in amorphous alloy powder, reaching a coercivity of 0.13 Oe. Core loss came to 191 kW per cubic metre at 1 MHz in a lab material that has not yet been scaled up or built into a working inductor.
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Manchester-led researchers say heat treatment split a lead-free bismuth ferrite-barium titanate ceramic into nanoregions that lift its Curie point to 824 C. It brings thin-film interface effects into bulk ceramic, but working temperatures and lifetimes for sensors have not been reported.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers report a 250 kW seawater hydrogen plant with 14.4% better electricity use than alkaline electrolysis. Stack heat distills the plant's own feed water and leaves a brine that could yield uranium, though no recovery rate has been reported.
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Researchers found 159 R2 retrotransposons in 1,139 avian genomes and engineered variants that reached up to 60% gene insertion in human primary cells. These are RNA-only tools, able to add a gene to the genome without delivering any DNA to the cell.
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Smile, a European-Chinese mission, began science operations after its ultraviolet camera caught a daylight aurora over the North Pole. The July frames show the hardware works, and findings on solar particles and Earth's magnetic field still await more data and a recalibrated X-ray imager.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences scientists found gamma-iron, never before seen in natural lunar material, as the main iron in two Chang'e-6 impact-glass samples. The mineral is a new candidate recorder of the Moon's lost magnetic field, though the team says further work must show how much it can reveal.
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Physicists at the University of Science and Technology of China lifted six-layer NbSe2's transition temperature by up to 5.4% inside a terahertz dark cavity. The Nature paper suggests a superconductor can be tuned through its surroundings alone, so far shown in one ultrathin compound.
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Astronomers timing PSR J1856-0039 with China's FAST telescope found the lowest combined mass of any known double neutron star system. The orbit shrinks as general relativity predicts, and formation models now have a lighter pair to account for.
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Murray Barrett's group at Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies spent more than a decade on an element no other timekeeping lab uses, and now reports one part in 10^19 for a single lutetium ion clock. A redefinition of the second is expected in or after 2030.
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ESA cleared the joint European-Chinese Smile mission for science on 23 September, after 95 days of commissioning in orbit. Its aurora camera is recording now, while the X-ray imager meant to map the magnetopause waits for stray light to fade in mid-October.
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Chinese Academy of Sciences researchers project warming will cut the South Asian monsoon's share of Mediterranean summer rain variance from 14.2% to 5.1%. The high-emissions projection is about what causes rain to swing from one summer to the next, and it does not say whether the region's summers will get wetter.
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China's Journal Excellence Action Plan funds 450 journals and 13 domestic publishers to build prestige titles that China owns outright. One of them is Vita, a fee-free biology journal whose standing will rest on whether leading labs in China and abroad send it their best work.
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InterSecLab's teardown of a Geedge Networks leak makes national censorship a procurement item. For anyone running networks or staff in Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan or Myanmar, that is supply chain.
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Science · August 27, 2026 · Confirmed3 publishers