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Research Highlights

Peking University

Beijing, China

China's oldest modern university, combining world-leading chemistry and semiconductor physics with earth system science of global reach.

Founded in 1898 as the Imperial University of Peking, Peking University is China's oldest modern university and remains among its most research-intensive, spanning humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering and a large medical complex of affiliated teaching hospitals. Its chemistry and physics departments are internationally formidable, with the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering producing some of the most consequential recent work on two-dimensional materials and ferroelectric oxides for low-power electronics. The College of Urban and Environmental Sciences has become a global centre for earth system science, contributing extensively to understanding of methane budgets, carbon sinks and crop responses to extreme heat. Elsewhere the School of Life Sciences pursues ancient genomics, the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences studies embodiment and plasticity, and the College of Future Technology works at the boundary of engineering and clinical medicine. Research institutes including BIOPIC and the School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics extend that breadth, while the Yanyuan campus in Beijing's Haidian district sits at the centre of China's densest research cluster.

A year of research

18 highlights, November 2025 to October 2026
October 2026

Frozen ground on the Qinghai-Xizang Plateau is gaining ice

Rainfall, not temperature, appears to be driving ground ice change across more than a third of a plateau warming twice as fast as the global average.

September 2026

Temperate Eurasia was the woolly rhinoceros heartland

Ancient genomes from under-sampled mid-latitude sites recast a famously cold-adapted animal's evolutionary centre of gravity.

September 2026

Heavy rainfall sends microplastics to the sea in concentrated pulses

Rivers carried about 260,000 tonnes of microplastics to the ocean in 2022, and roughly 70 per cent of it moved during the rainy season.

August 2026

Crop models have been underestimating rice heat vulnerability

Correcting seven global models against 214 field-warming observations more than doubles projected yield losses under one degree of warming.

July 2026

A memristor chip that models neural dynamics in under ten milliseconds

Computing inside memory rather than shuttling data to a processor brought real-time cortical surface reconstruction within reach.

June 2026

The visual brain can learn to treat virtual wings as limbs

After four sessions of flapping in virtual reality, occipitotemporal cortex began representing wings alongside human arms.

May 2026

A first-in-class candidate for the itch of cholestatic liver disease

Screening over 100,000 molecules against the itch receptor MRGPRX4 produced an inverse agonist now heading towards first-in-human trials.

April 2026

Low-loss microcavities carved from van der Waals crystals

An aluminium-passivated ion beam process lifted resonator quality factors by three orders of magnitude over previous layered-material devices.

March 2026

Tracing disease to its tissue of origin from one drop of blood

cf-EpiTracing reads epigenetic fingerprints from 50 microlitres of plasma, identifying not just that disease is present but where it comes from.

March 2026

Why atmospheric methane surged in the early 2020s

A weakened atmospheric sink, not a surge in emissions, explains roughly 80 per cent of the year-to-year variation in methane growth.

February 2026

A power law sets the speed limit for microlaser mode switching

Switching time scales as the inverse square root of how fast the control parameter is swept, measured with sub-ten-nanosecond resolution.

February 2026

A wafer-scale ferroelectric oxide that stays ferroelectric at a monolayer

Bismuth selenite transistors switch at 0.8 volts with endurance above a trillion cycles, exceeding current hafnia-based industrial systems.

January 2026

Turning tumour cells into the antigen presenters that betray them

A chimeric agent degrades PD-L1 while delivering peptides for display on the tumour's own MHC molecules, converting evasion into activation.

January 2026

A starless planet is weighed for the first time

Observing one microlensing event from Earth and from Gaia simultaneously turned a rogue planet candidate into a confirmed Saturn-class world.

December 2025

Mapping a national sleep problem and what might fix it

A PKU Sixth Hospital review sets out the social and systemic roots of insomnia and sleep apnoea in China, and four directions for policy.

December 2025

The cats beside early Chinese farmers were not domestic cats

Ancient DNA from 22 felines across 14 sites shows leopard cats lived alongside people for millennia before domestic cats arrived via the Silk Road.

November 2025

An AI that works out physical laws without being told them

AI-Newton builds a knowledge base of concepts and laws step by step, deriving velocity from position data and then reusing it to find mass.

November 2025

A knee exoskeleton that cuts a diver's air consumption

Assisting the flutter kick reduced air use by 22.7 per cent and muscle activation by around a fifth in tests with six experienced divers.