Picture a fisherman hauling in his nets on a calm morning at sea, when his smartwatch suddenly vibrates with an alert: “Magnetic anomaly detected – possible submarine passing 500 metres below.” Far‑fetched as it sounds, Chinese scientists have just taken a decisive step towards making that scenario real. A team from the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science and the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering, both under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), has created a Hall‑effect...

A research team at Zhejiang University (ZJU) has cracked a molecular puzzle, turning ordinary yeast into a powerful factory for an expensive cancer drug and boosting its production by a thousand times. The anticancer drug vinblastine has long been sourced exclusively from the Madagascar periwinkle (Catharanthus roseus) plant. But it takes up to 2 tonnes of dried leaves to yield just 1 gram (0.03 ounce) of vinblastine, making it more expensive than gold by weight. This extreme scarcity has kept...