The dataset consisted of Sina Weibo posts, allowing the analysis to consider the relationships between post characteristics and interactions recorded by the platform. Because the research analyzed existing posts and engagement outcomes, its results establish associations rather than showing that any particular framing choice caused users to respond. The team also conducted subgroup regressions to examine whether relationships between news values and engagement varied across media contexts.

Across these analyses, most news values showed positive associations with engagement, while the magnitude and direction of the relationships were not uniform for likes, comments and shares. The findings therefore indicate that a single engagement indicator would conceal variation in how audience responses were related to the framing of science news. Published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications , the study offers a platform-specific account of relationships among news values, framing and engagement with science news on Sina Weibo.

Its scope is limited to the analyzed posts, the three categories of news values and the measured engagement indicators. The supplied results do not establish that the same relationships apply to other social media platforms, countries, scientific disciplines or audience groups, nor do they demonstrate that particular framing strategies would cause reliably greater engagement. As an accepted open-access article shared before publication of the final version, the research is also subject to further editorial revision.

Subject of Research: Relationships among news values and engagement with science news on Sina Weibo

Article Title: Framing science in the digital age: exploring the relationships between general, social media-specific, and research-specific news values and audience engagement with science news on Sina Weibo

Article References: Dai, X., Liu, X., & Tian, W. (2026). Framing science in the digital age: exploring the relationships between general, social media-specific, and research-specific news values and audience engagement with science news on Sina Weibo. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-09465-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-026-09465-1

Keywords: science news, Sina Weibo, audience engagement, news values, social media, digital communication, framing analysis, regression modeling, Framing, science, digital, exploring

In his most celebrated work, the Republic, Plato presents Socrates exploring the nature of justice with several interlocutors. A central argument in this dialogue is that living a just life brings greater happiness, or eudaimonia, to a person than leading a life of injustice. To support this claim, Socrates develops the theory of the tripartite soul, proposing that the human mind is divided into three distinct parts: reason, spirit or passion, and appetite. According to this model, justice is not merely a set of external rules or social contracts, but an inner state of harmony among these three components, with reason ruling over spirit and appetite. The just person is happy because they listen to reason and thereby maintain control over their appetites and passions. Conversely, injustice is characterized by a state of disharmony, where the mind becomes a battlefield of warring passions and appetites, leading to inevitable unhappiness.

This philosophical perspective on inner character and happiness is foreshadowed in the opening of the Republic, where Socrates visits Cephalus, the elderly father of his friend Polemarchus. Cephalus, an affable older man, welcomes Socrates into his home near the port of Piraeus. He mentions that if he were still strong enough to make the journey into Athens, he would have gladly met Socrates there. Instead, he implores Socrates to visit him more often, noting that as his physical desires diminish, his passion for conversation and the pleasure derived from it increase. Socrates responds by expressing his enjoyment in talking to older men, arguing that they have already traveled along a road that everyone will eventually have to walk. He suggests it is crucial to understand the nature of this road, whether it is rough or smooth, and asks Cephalus to provide his report on the experience of old age.

Cephalus begins by recounting the common complaints of his peers. When they gather, most lament the loss of youthful pleasures, recalling sex, drinking, and good food that their age no longer permits. They often imagine that their youth was a good life and that their current existence is hardly life at all. Some also complain about the abuse they receive from their own families. However, Cephalus argues that these individuals are wrong to blame old age for their misery. He reasons that if old age were the sole cause of their suffering, then he and everyone else who has reached this stage of life would be miserable. Yet, he and countless others do not feel that way. Cephalus observes that he has found considerable peace and freedom in old age, describing it as an escape from many mad masters, meaning he is no longer living at the mercy of his passions, sexual or otherwise.

Cephalus concludes that when it comes to misery, the only thing to blame is one’s character. He contends that if individuals are moderate and contented, even old age is not difficult to bear. However, if they lack this inner moderation, both old age and youth become a burden. This philosophical insight stands in stark contrast to the prevailing attitude in much of today’s society, where growing old is often viewed as something to be resisted rather than experienced. The fetishization of youth has become a multibillion-dollar industry, with figures like biohacker Bryan Johnson becoming household names and terms such as lifemaxxing entering the common vernacular. This cultural shift reflects a deep-seated anxiety about aging, driven by the belief that youth is the only desirable state of being.

Gerontologists and medical professionals have also been criticized for focusing primarily on the preservation of youth rather than championing positive aging. The concept of successful aging, while well-intentioned, is controversial because it can establish an unnecessarily narrow ideal of what it means to age well. If successful aging is implicitly associated with remaining healthy, independent, and physically active, then frailty, disability, and dependence can be mistakenly regarded as personal failures rather than possible features of the human life course. Good gerontological and medical practice should neither fetishize youth nor simply lament its loss. Instead, it should seek to identify and support what remains possible and desirable for each individual, through evidence-based promotion of functional capacities, such as the implementation of the comprehensive geriatric assessment.

Plato’s portrayal of Cephalus illustrates the complexity of growing old. Cephalus no longer possesses the physical attributes to make the journey to Athens to visit Socrates, which may represent an emerging degree of frailty. However, this increase in physical vulnerability does not result in a decline in his wellbeing. On the contrary, Cephalus demonstrates that growing old has enriched his life. By reducing his physical desires, it has deepened his appreciation for other aspects of the human experience, such as conversation and friendship. In this passage from the Republic, Plato shows that it is illogical to think of old age as a root cause of misery, since there are many older people living happy, meaningful lives. As discussed earlier, for Plato, happiness goes hand in hand with an inner state of harmony, which he calls justice. Young people are just as likely to be unhappy as the old, since one’s inner life, not one’s age, is the main determinant of happiness.

In another dialogue, the Apology, Socrates compares himself to a gadfly and Athens to a sluggish horse. Just as the gadfly rouses the horse from its stupor, Socrates claims he is on a mission to sting or challenge his fellow citizens into self-examination by questioning their most deeply held beliefs. This is precisely what he does across Plato’s dialogues, from interrogating the priest and prophet Euthyphro on the concept of piety to shattering the general Laches’ notion of what it means to be courageous. Perhaps his conversation with Cephalus in the Republic serves a similar purpose, stinging us into examining our own biases and assumptions around what it means to grow old. By challenging the modern obsession with youth and physical preservation, Plato’s philosophy invites us to reconsider the value of inner harmony and character in the face of aging.

The implications of Plato’s philosophy for modern geriatric medicine are significant. By shifting the focus from merely extending lifespan or preserving physical youth to cultivating inner harmony and character, we can develop a more holistic approach to aging. This approach would recognize the value of conversation, friendship, and intellectual engagement, even in the face of physical frailty. It would also challenge the stigma associated with disability and dependence, viewing them not as failures but as natural parts of the human life course. In doing so, we can create a more compassionate and effective system of care for older adults, one that honors their dignity and supports their wellbeing in a meaningful way.

Subject of Research: Plato on the art of growing old

Article Title: Plato on the art of growing old

Article References: Daly, E., & Daly, S. (2026). Plato on the art of growing old. European Geriatric Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41999-026-01626-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s41999-026-01626-4

Keywords: Plato, growing, scientific research, peer-reviewed research, research findings, science news

Lichtenstein’s cross-disciplinary analysis, published on 1 December 2025, identifies nine distinct Prototypes of emergence, each reflecting a unique aspect or context in which the phenomenon is expressed. These range from phase transitions and quantum protectorates in condensed matter physics, through chemical and computational emergence, to interactional, biological, collaborative, dissipative, and generative emergence in social systems. Together, the Prototypes provide a scaffolding for organizing knowledge about emergence across levels of analysis, from molecular fusion to the self-organization of the global economic network.

The classic definition of emergence—a whole greater than the sum of its parts—captures something essential, but Lichtenstein draws on more formalized definitions from scholars such as Fulmer and Ostroff, De Wolf and Holvoet, and Goldstein to identify the defining characteristics of the phenomenon. These include macro properties not found in the system’s components, coherence, dynamical change over time, unpredictability in principle, interactional complexity, and radical novelty. Two further characteristics—supervenience and Goldstein’s concept of self-transcending constructions—remain debated, with some scientists dismissing downward causation as suggesting a mysterious force not permitted in natural science.

Within particular Prototypes, decades of research have produced law-like patterns. In computational emergence, Kauffman’s NK landscapes yield a Law of Interdependence: as the interdependence between elements of a system increases, the performance landscape becomes more rugged. In the dissipative structures prototype, Swenson described a Law of Maximum Entropy Production, whereby an open system far from equilibrium chooses the pathway that maximizes local entropy production—empirically, through the emergence of a dissipative structure that creates order. These lawful regularities suggest that a science of emergence could progressively identify broader principles across its many facets.

Lichtenstein proposes four empirically confirmed Principles of Generative Emergence, which extends the dissipative structures paradigm into social systems. First, generative emergence occurs only when the system is in disequilibrium—when agents leave the status quo and explore new possibilities with unknown potential. Second, successful emergence dramatically increases the capacity of the system and its agents, as shown by Prigogine’s thermodynamic systems, a bees nest hosting up to 60,000 bees, or Smith’s pin factory producing a hundredfold more pins than workers acting separately. Third, strong containers—the material and energetic constraints that shape a system’s behavior—are highly correlated with the emergence of new order. Fourth, emergence involves the complementarity of process and outcome: any given emergent is not fixed but continuously emerges, as a forest is ‘forest-ing’ itself through every leaf and tree and creature.

The implications of a science of emergence extend into leadership, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. In leadership, applying the Prototypes reveals how leadership occurs in every interaction, how collaborations can be strengthened, and how generative emergence is increasingly central to complexity leadership theory. Leaders can learn from the Principles: operating outside the norm to push the boundaries of the system, and building strong containers through clear agreements, accountability, and shared responsibility that empower the team.

In entrepreneurship, the creation of a new enterprise is a paradigmatic case of generative emergence, in which an organization emerges as a social entity with agency through the activities of its agents. Lichtenstein proposes a hypothesis for nascent entrepreneurs: the more an entrepreneur produces the four key dynamics of generative emergence—disequilibrium, capacity increase, strong containers, and attention to both process and outcome—the more likely their efforts will lead to a positive emergence event and the successful launch of their enterprise. While the theory has gained confirmation in several studies, it has not yet undergone a controlled test, though the groundwork has been laid for pursuing this approach more fully.

In sustainability, the metaphor of facets—each holding one clear view of an emergent—together expressing the full scope of the phenomenon, suggests categorizing the hundreds of specific initiatives around the world into twenty or so necessary areas. This would connect many people and networks interested in the same general issue, and focusing attention onto those approaches is much more likely to gain visible progress in each area, building momentum for further success. Lichtenstein grounds this claim in two major studies on resolving the climate crisis, offering theoretical leverage and a measure of hope toward starting to resolve the global polycrisis.

Lichtenstein acknowledges limitations, in particular a bias toward positive emergences, with one building on the next. However, the outcomes of emergence are never predictable, and an emergence can dissolve an organization as much as it can create one. Although this does not invalidate the claims, it speaks to the need to more formally examine generative emergence and test the veracity and viability of its principles. As a science, emergence would be pluralistic, constructive, and integrative in the long term, structured through a set of Prototypes that together encompass all tangible expressions of the phenomenon. Each Prototype provides access to emergence and its emergents, and is a container for combined knowledge—so that, fittingly, the science of emergence may continue to emerge.

Subject of Research: Emergence as a science

Article Title: Emergence as a science

Article References: Lichtenstein, B. (2025). Emergence as a science. Frontiers in Complex Systems, 3, Article 1667670. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcpxs.2025.1667670

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fcpxs.2025.1667670

Keywords: Emergence, science, scientific research, peer-reviewed research, research findings, science news

To understand why surface wrinkles matter so much, it helps to revisit the basic physics of multi-junction solar cells. In a single-junction device, photons above the absorber’s bandgap deposit their excess energy as heat, while photons below the gap pass through unabsorbed — a fundamental trade-off that caps efficiency around the Shockley–Queisser limit. Stacking multiple absorbers with different bandgaps circumvents this constraint: a wide-bandgap top cell harvests high-energy blue photons, while narrower-gap layers beneath capture the red and infrared remainder. All-perovskite triple-junction designs are particularly attractive because perovskites offer tunable bandgaps, solution processability and strong defect tolerance. But the topmost layer in these stacks must be an ultrawide-bandgap perovskite — approaching roughly 2 electron volts — and that is precisely where the chemistry turns hostile.

The hostility stems from bromide. To push a perovskite’s bandgap into the ultrawide regime, formulators must replace much of the iodide in the crystal lattice with the smaller, more electronegative bromide anion. High bromide content, however, destabilizes the film during deposition and annealing. As the solvent evaporates and the crystallites grow, differential stresses and uneven halide distribution produce a surface texture the researchers describe as wrinkling — nanoscale and microscale corrugations that ripple across the top interface of the film. These wrinkles are not merely cosmetic. They increase surface area where recombination can occur, disrupt the uniformity of subsequent charge-transport layers, and scatter light in uncontrolled ways. Worse still, the same high-bromide chemistry promotes halide disorder: iodide and bromide ions segregate into bromide-rich and iodide-rich domains, creating local bandgap fluctuations that act as recombination hotspots and undermine the very wide bandgap the design depends on.

The new work, discussed in the News & Views analysis, tackles both problems simultaneously through a combined surface reconstruction and halide homogenization strategy. Surface reconstruction, in essence, reprocesses the topmost region of the perovskite film after it forms, relaxing the strained, defect-rich outer layer and allowing it to recrystallize into a flatter, more orderly termination. Halide homogenization addresses the compositional side of the problem, encouraging iodide and bromide to distribute evenly through the lattice rather than pooling into segregated phases. Together, the two interventions produce an ultrawide-bandgap perovskite surface that is morphologically smooth, compositionally uniform and electronically cleaner — three qualities that wide-bandgap perovskites have historically failed to deliver at once.

The consequences for device performance are dramatic. In the reported all-perovskite triple-junction devices, the smoothed 2-electron-volt top absorber transmits its full complement of sub-bandgap photons to the middle and bottom cells while extracting high-energy charge carriers with far fewer losses. The certified efficiency of 29.3 percent represents a benchmark for all-perovskite triple-junction technology, a figure that places these fully thin-film stacks in the same conversation as the best silicon-based tandems while retaining the advantages of low-temperature, scalable fabrication. Certification matters here: independent verification distinguishes genuine reproducible performance from laboratory optimism, and a certified number signals to the field that the surface-engineering approach survives the scrutiny of recognized testing protocols.

The path to this point has been built on a sequence of steady advances that the Nature Energy analysis situates in context. Earlier work on wide-bandgap perovskites documented the efficiency ceilings imposed by halide segregation and interfacial recombination, establishing the diagnosis that the new treatment directly addresses. Subsequent studies demonstrated high-performance perovskite-based multi-junction architectures and clarified how the constituent subcells could be optically and electrically matched. The underlying research article by Zhang and colleagues, which the analysis accompanies, now closes the loop by showing that the materials problem — the wrinkled, halide-disordered surface of ultrawide-bandgap absorbers — could be engineered away rather than merely tolerated. In the ecosystem of photovoltaics research, this is how fields advance: not by a single breakthrough, but by each study removing the specific obstacle the previous one identified.

From a manufacturing standpoint, the significance of the result extends beyond the headline efficiency. Solution-processed perovskites can in principle be deposited by printing, blade coating or roll-to-roll methods at temperatures far below those required for high-quality silicon, promising low embodied energy and low cost. But every additional processing step must be compatible with the layers beneath it, and triple-junction stacks compound this challenge: the top cell’s surface must accept a charge-transport layer, then a recombination layer, then the next absorber, each without degrading what came before. A wrinkled, compositionally inhomogeneous surface jeopardizes every one of those interfaces. By flattening and homogenizing the top absorber before the stack is completed, the reconstruction strategy improves not just a single interface but the integrity of the entire device architecture — a systems-level benefit that efficiency figures alone understate.

There are also deeper scientific questions that the work reframes. Halide segregation in mixed-halide perovskites has been studied extensively under illumination, where it manifests as photoinduced phase separation; the wrinkling phenomenon tied to high bromide content during film formation is a related but distinct failure mode rooted in crystallization mechanics. Understanding how strain, surface energy and halide mobility interact during deposition — and how a post-deposition reconstruction can erase the damage — offers a template that may generalize beyond ultrawide-bandgap compositions. If the same principles can be applied to tune the surfaces of other wide-bandgap perovskites, or to heal defects in the buried interfaces of the lower subcells, the entire tandem design space opens up. The Kyoto authors, who have long studied the chemistry of perovskite film formation from both academic and industrial perspectives — Wakamiya is co-founder and chief science and technology advisor of the perovskite startup EneCoat Technologies — are well placed to translate that understanding into manufacturable processes.

Challenges remain on the road to commercialization, and the analysis is careful to keep them in view. Triple-junction perovskite devices must prove their operational stability over thousands of hours of illumination, thermal cycling and moisture exposure — tests that mixed-halide compositions, with their susceptibility to ion migration, have historically found difficult. Scaling the surface reconstruction from small-area champion cells to large-area modules without sacrificing uniformity is another hurdle, as is demonstrating that the certified 29.3 percent can be reproduced with the reproducibility that industrial partners require. And the perovskite field as a whole still faces questions of lead content and end-of-life recycling that no efficiency record can resolve. Yet the trajectory is unambiguous: a technology that could not break 20 percent a few years ago is now approaching the practical ceiling of single-junction silicon, with theoretical headroom that silicon simply does not have.

For now, the image that captures the advance is the one its title invokes: wrinkles, ironed out. Nanoscale corrugations and halide disorder that once seemed like unavoidable consequences of wide-bandgap chemistry have been shown to be engineering problems with engineering solutions. With a certified 29.3 percent efficiency in an all-perovskite triple-junction cell, the field has demonstrated that the highest-performance perovskite architectures need not be compromised by their most challenging component. As the analysis by Nakamura, Truong and Wakamiya makes clear, the recipe for next-generation photovoltaics may hinge not on exotic new materials, but on learning to make the surfaces of the ones we already have perfectly flat, perfectly mixed and perfectly quiet — at least at the level of the electron.

Subject of Research: Ironing out the wrinkles

Article Title: Ironing out the wrinkles

Article References: Nakamura, T., Truong, M. A., & Wakamiya, A. (2026). Ironing out the wrinkles. Nature Energy. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-026-02127-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41560-026-02127-1

Keywords: Ironing, wrinkles, scientific research, peer-reviewed research, research findings, science news