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The development of safe and effective maternal-fetal therapeutics is significantly hindered by chronic underfunding, inequitable access to specialized care, and persistent sociopolitical stigmas surrounding women’s health. Addressing these challenges will require interdisciplinary collaboration between clinicians, scientists, and engineers to design accessible therapeutics for maternal-fetal healthcare.
Traditional flexible sensors struggle with synchronized multimodal perception and robustness, limiting their performance in extreme environments. Baijin Mao and colleagues propose an ultra-robust bionic distributed multimodal flexible sensor inspired by tiger-shark skin.
Delphine De Tavernier and colleagues report that next-generation wind turbines may face transonic flow at the blade tip during normal operation. They propose and demonstrate the use of a Transonic Safe Mode, a strategy to ensure a safe design and operation.
Resistive memory devices often require an energy-intensive forming step that limits efficiency and reliability. Erbing Hua and colleagues report forming-free Pd/HfO2 devices enabled by a Pd-O-Hf interfacial mechanism, supporting multi-bit operation and reduced energy use in spiking neural networks.
Christian E. N. Petersen and colleagues propose a method to extract charge carrier density-dependent mobility from two-terminal measurements. The approach enables mobility analysis without the need for multi-terminal devices, simplifying nanowire characterization.
Studying brain function requires synchronized recording of the brain and behavior in real time. Jarl Haggerty and colleagues describe Thalamus, an open-source platform that synchronizes multimodal data and enables low-latency closed-loop experiments.
Xuan Li and colleagues report a miniature flextensional ultrasonic surgical device driven by a pre-stressed piezoelectric stack with vibration-amplifying metal caps. In vitro robot bone cutting showed less than 1 N force and less than 6% cut width deviation from blade thickness.
Manipulating waves across different materials is limited by signal loss and a narrow bandwidth. Xiaojing Li and colleagues propose a metasurface design that achieves efficient, wideband control of electromagnetic waves at such interfaces.
Henry A. Martin and colleagues design co-packaged electronics with microfluidics to bridge the thermal gap between the device junction and the coolant. This is beneficial for mid-to-high power electronics, chiplet architectures, and multi-chip packages.
Saurabh Prabhakar and colleagues propose a spike-based neuromorphic protection framework for inverter-dominated microgrids using local voltage, current, and power disturbances. The approach enables fast, communication-free fault detection and selective isolation.
Yaoli Zhao and colleagues have developed a non-destructive method to determine the percentage of recycled plastic content in a plastic product. By combining multi-modal sensing with machine learning, this approach enables reliable verification of recycled content, supporting regulatory compliance, quality control, and circular plastics manufacturing.
Dokyum Kim and colleagues report a post-treatment strategy using dopamine hydrochloride to simultaneously enable halide exchange and surface defect passivation in CsPbBr3 NCs. This work addresses a key challenge in halide perovskite nanocrystal (PNC) research, where wavelength tuning and structural stability are achieved through separate or multi-step surface engineering processes.
3D positioning of moving objects typically relies on costly attitude sensors or external calibration. Junfan Yi, Ke-ke Shang and colleague propose a hybrid AI-mathematics framework that enables real-time 3D positioning using only three off-the-shelf cameras.
Ravi Tejwani and colleagues present a robot guidance controller that coordinates physical forces and verbal instructions based on real-time human compliance estimation. User studies demonstrate significant improvements in task performance over single-modality approaches.
Catherine Crichton and colleagues describe a flexible printed adhesive hydrogel bioelectrode for long-term monitoring of plant electrophysiology. By maintaining stable electrical contact for weeks, these biocompatible electrodes can transform plants into reliable living sensors.
Kaiqiao Yang and colleagues propose a differentiable geometric optimization framework for manipulating electromagnetic fields. The approach enables automated shape design by coupling ray-based electromagnetic modelling with gradient-based optimization.
Metallic materials are generally efficient sound conductors. Yuqi Jin and colleagues introduce an approach utilizing laser powder bed fusion printed CrMnFeCoNi high entropy alloy samples with optimized intrinsic internal voids during manufacturing to achieve broadband acoustic insulation.
Kaisa Liimatainen et al. developed a virtual reality application for 3D image data visualization of tissue samples. The platform enables intuitive and immersive visualization and exploration, facilitating findings in microenvironment and growth patterns while tackling the challenge of sparse image stacks.
Xincheng Li and colleagues report a framework integrating robotic inspection and digital twins for the fatigue assessment of steel bridges. This approach enables automated crack quantification and lifecycle prognosis, improving the safety of infrastructure.
Optical aberrations limit the resolution and reliability of many fluorescence microscopy techniques. Atsushi Matsuda and colleagues report a computational adaptive optics method that restores image quality and corrects aberration-related distortions without additional hardware.