Lead Story
Coal drops below half of China's electricity mix for the first time ever
China's National Energy Administration reported that coal-fired power supplied 49.7% of the country's electricity in the first half of 2026, the first time it has fallen under 50% on record. Renewable energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, and other clean generation — made up 41.2% of output over the same period, together generating more power than the country's tertiary industry and all urban and rural households combined. Wind and solar alone supplied nearly a quarter of total generation, and China's combined installed wind and solar capacity reached 1.95 billion kilowatts by the end of June, up 16.8% year over year. Investment in new energy storage surged 74.3% and funding for hydrogen projects jumped more than 160% in the same window. As the world's largest electricity producer and carbon emitter, China crossing this threshold marks a real inflection point in the global energy transition rather than just an incremental improvement.
Read more →Lead Story
Coal drops below half of China's electricity mix for the first time ever
China's National Energy Administration reported that coal-fired power supplied 49.7% of the country's electricity in the first half of 2026, the first time it has fallen under 50% on record. Renewable energy sources — wind, solar, hydro, and other clean generation — made up 41.2% of output over the same period, together generating more power than the country's tertiary industry and all urban and rural households combined. Wind and solar alone supplied nearly a quarter of total generation, and China's combined installed wind and solar capacity reached 1.95 billion kilowatts by the end of June, up 16.8% year over year. Investment in new energy storage surged 74.3% and funding for hydrogen projects jumped more than 160% in the same window. As the world's largest electricity producer and carbon emitter, China crossing this threshold marks a real inflection point in the global energy transition rather than just an incremental improvement.
Scientists pinpoint why statins cause muscle pain — and how to stop it
Researchers at McMaster University have identified the immune mechanism behind the muscle pain, weakness, and exercise intolerance that cause many patients to stop taking statins, one of the world's most widely prescribed cholesterol drugs. The team found that statins alter energy processing inside muscle cells, which in turn triggers the cells to mount their own inflammatory immune response, causing the damage previously blamed on the drugs directly. Published in Science Advances, the study showed that suppressing this specific immune pathway in mouse and isolated-muscle-cell models prevented the muscle damage entirely, without blocking the drug's cardiovascular benefits. Because statin intolerance is a leading reason patients abandon a therapy proven to prevent heart attacks and strokes, the discovery opens a concrete path toward add-on treatments that could let far more people safely stay on statins long term.
Read more →Scientists pinpoint why statins cause muscle pain — and how to stop it
Researchers at McMaster University have identified the immune mechanism behind the muscle pain, weakness, and exercise intolerance that cause many patients to stop taking statins, one of the world's most widely prescribed cholesterol drugs. The team found that statins alter energy processing inside muscle cells, which in turn triggers the cells to mount their own inflammatory immune response, causing the damage previously blamed on the drugs directly. Published in Science Advances, the study showed that suppressing this specific immune pathway in mouse and isolated-muscle-cell models prevented the muscle damage entirely, without blocking the drug's cardiovascular benefits. Because statin intolerance is a leading reason patients abandon a therapy proven to prevent heart attacks and strokes, the discovery opens a concrete path toward add-on treatments that could let far more people safely stay on statins long term.
Mixed plastic waste can now be turned directly into clean hydrogen fuel, no sorting required
Engineers at UCLA and Ewha Womans University have developed a chemical process that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics — PET, polyethylene, and polypropylene — directly into hydrogen fuel exceeding 90% purity, without first sorting the waste by type. The method, called alkaline thermal treatment, uses sodium hydroxide reacting with the plastic under heat, running at temperatures 300–400°C lower than conventional gasification while capturing most of the plastic's carbon in solid or liquid byproducts instead of releasing it as CO2. Because real-world plastic waste streams are almost never cleanly separated, skipping the sorting step removes one of the biggest practical barriers to recycling plastic into usable clean fuel at scale. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with researchers now working to scale the process beyond the lab and further boost hydrogen yields.
Read more →Mixed plastic waste can now be turned directly into clean hydrogen fuel, no sorting required
Engineers at UCLA and Ewha Womans University have developed a chemical process that converts a mixture of the three most common plastics — PET, polyethylene, and polypropylene — directly into hydrogen fuel exceeding 90% purity, without first sorting the waste by type. The method, called alkaline thermal treatment, uses sodium hydroxide reacting with the plastic under heat, running at temperatures 300–400°C lower than conventional gasification while capturing most of the plastic's carbon in solid or liquid byproducts instead of releasing it as CO2. Because real-world plastic waste streams are almost never cleanly separated, skipping the sorting step removes one of the biggest practical barriers to recycling plastic into usable clean fuel at scale. The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with researchers now working to scale the process beyond the lab and further boost hydrogen yields.
Australia's citizen 'Bug Hunt' tops one million observations and is already catching invasive species
Since launching in October 2025, the Bug Hunt project run by the Invasive Species Council and Invertebrates Australia has passed one million public observations of insects, spiders, snails, and other invertebrates, logged by ordinary Australians using the iNaturalist app. The nationwide catalogue is designed to help scientists track native invertebrate populations while flagging new arrivals of invasive pests before they can spread. The crowdsourced data has already contributed to detecting incursions of red imported fire ants and, more recently, an invasive Asian honey bee incursion around Brisbane, allowing biosecurity authorities to respond faster than traditional monitoring would allow. Organizers note invasive species have driven roughly two-thirds of Australia's species extinctions since colonization, making this kind of early-warning citizen science a meaningful new line of defense — and no special expertise is needed to take part, just a smartphone and some curiosity.
Read more →Australia's citizen 'Bug Hunt' tops one million observations and is already catching invasive species
Since launching in October 2025, the Bug Hunt project run by the Invasive Species Council and Invertebrates Australia has passed one million public observations of insects, spiders, snails, and other invertebrates, logged by ordinary Australians using the iNaturalist app. The nationwide catalogue is designed to help scientists track native invertebrate populations while flagging new arrivals of invasive pests before they can spread. The crowdsourced data has already contributed to detecting incursions of red imported fire ants and, more recently, an invasive Asian honey bee incursion around Brisbane, allowing biosecurity authorities to respond faster than traditional monitoring would allow. Organizers note invasive species have driven roughly two-thirds of Australia's species extinctions since colonization, making this kind of early-warning citizen science a meaningful new line of defense — and no special expertise is needed to take part, just a smartphone and some curiosity.
Physicists build the world's first photonic time crystal, unlocking ultrafast control of light
An international team from École Polytechnique, Collège de France, and Germany's Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has experimentally created the first all-optical photonic time crystal, a metamaterial engineered to rapidly and repeatedly change its optical properties over time rather than in space. Using HZDR's powerful TELBE terahertz source, the gold-based plasmonic metamaterial was shown to cut terahertz photon losses by more than half while reshaping how terahertz light behaves on trillionths-of-a-second timescales. The result, published in Nature, had been theorized for years but never achieved in an all-optical system until now. Because terahertz light sits at the frontier of ultrafast computing, next-generation wireless communication, and advanced medical imaging, the breakthrough gives engineers a fundamentally new tool for tuning light's color and intensity almost instantly — a capability that could feed into faster chips, sharper imaging, and a new class of highly tunable lasers.
Read more →Physicists build the world's first photonic time crystal, unlocking ultrafast control of light
An international team from École Polytechnique, Collège de France, and Germany's Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf has experimentally created the first all-optical photonic time crystal, a metamaterial engineered to rapidly and repeatedly change its optical properties over time rather than in space. Using HZDR's powerful TELBE terahertz source, the gold-based plasmonic metamaterial was shown to cut terahertz photon losses by more than half while reshaping how terahertz light behaves on trillionths-of-a-second timescales. The result, published in Nature, had been theorized for years but never achieved in an all-optical system until now. Because terahertz light sits at the frontier of ultrafast computing, next-generation wireless communication, and advanced medical imaging, the breakthrough gives engineers a fundamentally new tool for tuning light's color and intensity almost instantly — a capability that could feed into faster chips, sharper imaging, and a new class of highly tunable lasers.