One of the essential elements of marine biochemical processes is zinc, which is a vital micronutrient for plankton and other marine life. A team of investigators has shed new light on the intricacies of the zinc cycle through the study of water and sediment samples taken from the Southern Ocean.

Finding alternative electrocatalysts is an important goal in the quest for a carbon-neutral energy grid. Researchers turned to the artificial intelligence technique of machine learning to efficiently screen thousands of possible catalysts and identify some likely choices.

Hydrogen doping, or hydrogenation, has been applied to many materials, including oxide compounds with complex crystalline structures. A research team recently demonstrated, for the first time, that transient polarization can spontaneously arise in H-NNO. The scientists also performed tantalizing experiments indicating the potential of H-NNO for neuromorphic computing, which mimics human brain processes.

A new class of medicines called PROTACs destroy disease-causing proteins by hijacking the cell’s degradation machinery. A team of scientists has engineered a PROTAC molecule that degrades two proteins that promote cancer, without causing off-target side effects. 

Lanthanides and other rare earth elements are quite difficult to separate and purify from the other materials with which they're usually found. Because of the great value and utility of these metals for many purposes, including electronics, computing, and various industrial processes that rely on their unique electronic and chemical properties, that difficulty is a major problem. Researchers using the Advanced Photon Source took inspiration from nature to examine a new possibility for lanthanide separation.