Carbon fibre-reinforced polymers are high-performance materials used in various items, including aircraft, wind-turbine blades and mountain bicycles. A process has been developed that uses acetic acid to break down carbon fibre-reinforced polymers into their major components, which can then be recovered and reused, potentially enabling the recycling of these materials at scale.

Australian migratory moths use the night sky to maintain their course when they travel long distances to shelter in cool caves during the arid summer.

The activity of neuronal cells that release the neurotransmitter dopamine is thought to encode differences between predicted and actual rewards. This ‘prediction error’ is key to reinforcement learning. It emerges that dopamine neurons differ in their timescales for temporal discounting, enabling the brain to implement sophisticated reinforcement-learning algorithms along multiple timescales.

Trauma leaves traces in the brain. A study of alterations in gene regulation in the brains of people with post-traumatic stress disorder offers insights into its biology.