A cheaper way to fight 'forever chemicals': How pH-controlled traps could clean drinking water

Engineers interested in creating artificial cells to deliver drugs to unhealthy parts of the body face a key challenge: for a cell-like system to move, change shape, or divide, it needs a way to generate force on command.

Humans have always been playful. But for much of our history, play has left little trace. Unlike tools or bones, games rarely preserve and the fleeting pleasures they produce are even harder to recover.

In a major advance, researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have devised a method to grow high-quality 2D magnetic materials (2D-MMs) over centimeter-scale wafers. Earlier approaches in the field were limited to growing micrometer-sized flakes. This advance paves the way for their integration into next-generation electronics and spintronics materials used in hard drives and sensors.

I spent last summer wading through seagrass meadows across Northern Ireland, from the sheltered waters of Strangford Lough to the exposed coast at Waterfoot Bay. I was collecting seagrass leaves and testing them for nitrogen pollution. Every meadow I visited sits inside a marine protected area—a stretch of sea that's been given legal protection to safeguard the wildlife living there. And every single one was polluted beyond the limit for healthy seagrass.