Metamaterials are a class of artificially engineered materials with extraordinary properties not found in nature. These materials exhibit unique characteristics and have wide-ranging applications in fields such as imaging, communications, energy, and aerospace. Among them, thermal radiative metamaterials can “package” and emit excess heat to the space. Wearing “clothing” made from such materials is like putting on a “cooling magic garment”, enabling automatic temperature regulation for objects. These materials hold significant promise for applications in zero-energy-consumption radiative cooling, thermal management of electronic devices, and personal thermal comfort applications.

Macaca fascicularis and Macaca mulatta are the most commonly used non-human primates in experimental research and are widely utilized in biomedical and human evolutionary studies due to their close genetic affinity to humans (having diverged around 25 million years ago), particularly in the fields of human trait formation, disease modeling, and drug metabolism. Their reference genome has been widely applied in these studies, especially in understanding human characteristic trait formation, disease modeling, and drug metabolism. However, the existing reference genomes still contain many unknown sequences, particularly in the regions of the centromere, segmental duplications (SDs), and ribosomal DNA (rDNA), which limits the in-depth exploration of primate evolutionary mechanisms and their biomedical value.

On April 9, Professor Xiaoshi Qian’s group, in collaboration with Professor Shujun Zhang from Australia’s University of Wollongong, published a research article titled “Giant electrocaloric effect in high-polar-entropy perovskite oxides” in Nature. By deliberately disrupting the order of the polar structure at the atomic scale, the team developed a "high-polar-entropy ceramic" with lattice-level disorder. This innovation significantly enhanced the giant electrocaloric effect in lead-free ferroelectric ceramics. The study offers a new material design strategy for electrocaloric refrigeration technologies and demonstrates cross-scale fabrication of integrated multilayer electrocaloric refrigerants.

A research team led by Professor Xiaoshi Qian from the SJTU School of Mechanical Engineering has designed and synthesized a new lead-free perovskite oxide featuring a high-polar-entropy state that exhibits a giant electrocaloric effect. Their work sheds light on the fundamental relationship between atomic-scale structure and material performance.

A research team led by Professors Zhiwen Shi and Qi Liang from the School of Physics and Astronomy at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) have achieved a significant scientific milestone. In collaboration with their partners, the team published a research article in Science titled “Homochiral carbon nanotube van der Waals crystals.” The paper was released online ahead-of-print through Science’s First Release platform.

The School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology