Article describes how photoconductivity is the crucial benchmark to assess the potential of any emerging material for future solar applications. This tutorial aims to familiarize the reader with the main THz techniques used to explore emerging materials.

Article describes how acrylic polymers, commonly used in paints, can degrade over time by several different chemical and physical mechanisms, depending on structure and exposure conditions. In this work, the authors studied the effects of different degradation mechanisms and agents on properties of acrylic polymers found in artists’ acrylic paints for the first time using atomistic molecular dynamics simulations.

Article describes how, although pennycress, a winter annual, could be grown as a dedicated bioenergy crop, an increase in its seed oil content is required to improve its economic competitiveness. In this work, the authors combined biomass composition with metabolomic and transcriptomic studies of developing embryos from 22 pennycress natural variants to identify targets for oil improvement.

Article describes that proanthocyanidins (PAs), flavonoid polymers involved in plant defense, are also beneficial to human health and ruminant nutrition. The authors explore whether there is a functional PA biosynthesis pathway in maize using a combination of analytical chemistry and genetic approaches.

Article describes how DNA-based aquatic biomonitoring methods show promise to provide rapid, standardized, and efficient biodiversity assessment to supplement and in some cases replace current morphology-based approaches that are often less efficient and can produce inconsistent results. The authors present a comparison of DNA metabarcoding and morphological identification, leveraging national-scale, open-source, ecological datasets from the National Ecological Observatory Network.