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Researchers led by Professor Ido Braslavsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem created BioPykrete, a composite of ice, cellulose nanocrystals and an engineered protein called CBM3a-AFPIII. The material is about ten times stronger under compression than ordinary ice, absorbs roughly 70 times more energy before failing, and deforms gradually rather than cracking suddenly.
Researchers at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, led by Dr. Louis Longin and Dr. Ophelia Deroy, surveyed almost 1,100 participants on whether artificial agents and humans possess mental states after being shown identical descriptions of behavior, such as reacting to sounds or recognizing others' emotions. Published in Cognition, the study found participants consistently attributed less consciousness to AI than to humans performing the same actions under the same conditions.
Researchers at Hopkins Marine Station observed that a bleached coral fragment regained its pigmentation after being placed touching a healthy fragment from the same coral colony. In a controlled experiment with ten fragment pairs of Pocillopora damicornis, five pairs were set to touch each other while five were kept apart, and the touching pairs showed transfer of symbiotic algae and rapid recovery of colour within days to weeks. The findings were published in Science Advances on 14 October.
Xinyu Dong, a materials scientist at the National University of Singapore, is adapting freeze casting—a method traditionally used to build ceramic bone-repair scaffolds—to engineer hydrogels with improved structural properties. The technique involves freezing a water-based slurry in a controlled direction so ice crystals push material particles into an organized porous network, which is later preserved after the ice is removed. Dong began this work during her PhD in 2020 and has since extended the approach to aerogels and, in 2024, proposed a new variation of the freeze-casting process for hydrogels.
Researchers led by biochemist Ido Braslavsky at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have created a reinforced ice material called BioPykrete by combining plant-based crystals with a custom protein. The material is reported to be 10 times stronger than ordinary ice and can absorb 70 times more energy before breaking, with findings published in Colloids and Surfaces B: Biointerfaces.
Several foreign institutions, including the Universities of Southampton, Liverpool, Bristol, York and the University of New South Wales, are establishing physical campuses in India. This expansion comes as India's higher education market, already serving more than 43 million students, continues to grow, even as online and AI-driven learning make information more freely accessible worldwide.
Researchers and former officials gathered at Queen Mary University of London for a war-game exercise simulating how nations, companies and NGOs would respond to solar radiation modification technologies that could cool the planet by reflecting sunlight. Participants, including climate researcher Colleen Golja, played roles ranging from national governments to indigenous groups and tech firms, testing how a race to deploy such technology might unfold. The exercise revealed that reaching consensus on ethical, science-based deployment proved far harder than expected.
Reanalyzing 1999 Hubble data with an updated chemical database, University of Warwick-led researchers identified roughly 100 previously unexplained chemical signatures around white dwarf HS 0209+0832 as niobium, an element formed only in extreme stellar conditions. Niobium levels were about 1,000 times higher than in our sun, which the team says points to a planet formed from material shed by the dying star itself rather than from its original birth cloud.
New data indicates that the long-running growth in college administrative staffing may be reversing. At Louisiana State University, an incoming president announced the layoff of 25 administrators, some in senior roles, redirecting the resulting savings toward faculty hiring and research.
Researchers at the University of Oxford used a quantum system combining qubits with quantum oscillators to recreate the Aharonov-Bohm effect, in which a charged particle's quantum phase shifts due to magnetic flux it never physically passes through. In their simulation, this invisible influence caused a modeled particle's motion to halt entirely. The results were published in Nature Physics.
Researchers from the University of East Anglia, working with collaborators in South Africa, showed that specially prepared light beams can spontaneously acquire spinning, chiral patterns as they travel through empty space. This effect normally requires lenses, mirrors or engineered materials, but the team produced it using only the light's own internal geometric structure.
A researcher at Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy reported a senior colleague's mistreatment of a female administrator in 2021, but instead faced an internal investigation and accusations against himself. After a five-year legal battle, an employment tribunal ruled in August that he had been retaliated against for raising a matter of public interest, and the university has accepted the judgment and pledged to review its procedures.