News & Comment

As electric vehicles become tightly coupled to public charging infrastructure and power systems, battery safety extends beyond individual vehicles. Public charging networks could evolve from energy dispensers into shared ‘safety outposts’ that provide infrastructure-level protection for electric vehicle batteries.

As wind farms multiply, wake effects from upwind wind farms reduce downwind output, a phenomenon known as ‘wind theft’ that costs billions and sparks disputes. Interdisciplinary collaboration can address this growing challenge.

Artificial intelligence systems are becoming gigawatt-scale, always-on workloads that today’s power systems were not built to carry. Capacity expansion and short-term coordination alone cannot close this gap. Here, we argue that alignment requires a structural perspective: enabling energy and computation systems to interpret each other’s structural organization and evolving constraints.

Continued scaling brings intertwined challenges in transport and heat dissipation. Advancing 3D nanodevice technologies requires a unified understanding of electron and energy flow, an expanded toolbox of integration-ready materials, and stronger alignment between theoretical modelling and fabrication strategies to drive innovation effectively.

Semimetal-in-oxide design unlocks tellurium oxides for p-type devices, combining performance, scalability and process compatibility for future low-power logic, advanced integration, sensing and resilient electronics.

Ensuring battery safety and longevity requires cost-effective and scalable diagnostics, yet these are hindered by the ‘black box’ nature of batteries and limited sensing technology. Active perturbations could elicit informative responses that improve diagnostic performance and provide mechanistic insights, unlocking rapid and interpretable diagnostics.

There are challenges in making large-scale and full utilization of renewable energy in power systems. We consider the need to integrate prediction, analysis, dispatch and control — and call for a systems engineering approach to power system operation that can enhance the utilization of renewable energy.

Resistive random-access-memory (RRAM)-based computing-in-memory (CIM) chips could overcome the von Neumann bottleneck and drastically improve energy efficiency for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. However, realizing their scalability necessitates the realization of higher-density integration, calling for cross-layer innovations from RRAM device optimization and unit cell design to integration strategies.

Data centres powering artificial intelligence now consume vast amounts of electricity, which raises new sustainability concerns. Underwater data centres powered by offshore wind, solar and wave energy, and cooled by seawater systems, offer a route toward zero-carbon artificial intelligence.

China’s microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensor industry is surging, but technical gaps, fragmented production and coordination challenges hinder its full potential. As global demand accelerates, it is important to consolidate this sector and forge greater independence in innovation to enhance China’s global competitiveness in the field.

A century after the inception of quantum theory, its unresolved interpretations continue to threaten patent validity and investors’ confidence in quantum technologies.

The electronics industry has transformed every aspect of people’s lives, with the sector in Mexico —including its designs, manufacturing, global technical support services and supply chains — making a major contribution. To sustain its momentum, Mexico must adapt its electronics industry to rapid technological shifts and changing trade dynamics.

Somatosensory feedback is an essential feature of neural prostheses that aim to restore natural hand dexterity after neurological injuries. This Comment discusses the potential and challenges of electrically stimulating sensory neurons, highlighting the need for highly selective neurotechnology and biomimetic-encoding algorithms for effective brain–machine interfacing.

The endurance, retention and system-level performance of memristors for memory and computation has been often misrepresented in articles that lack statistics and use non-standardized characterization and simulation protocols. Here we discuss the origin of these issues, their negative effect in the nascent memristor industry, and potential ways to mitigate them.

Learning and embodiment are intertwined, resulting in a mutually reinforcing effect. Research should aim not only for learning to enhance embodiment, but also, more importantly, for embodiment to facilitate learning. Achieving synergy between these two aspects remains an ongoing challenge.

Designing marketable 6G measurement tools presents technical and logistical challenges, including generating and capturing signals in new spectrum allocations with high speed and low latency, managing wide bandwidths, and ensuring system-level synchronization. Overcoming these challenges requires advances in hardware design and implementation of instrumentation tools tailored for 6G test environments.

Wearable bioelectronics are reshaping patient care through seamless, personalized monitoring. As technology is gradually becoming smoothly integrated into our daily life, its success will depend not only on innovation, but also on our ability to ensure responsible integration — balancing performance, usability and equitable access.

As digitalization permeates societal interactions to connect people over physical distances, mediated social touch (haptics in human-to-human interaction) remains overlooked despite its high potential in times of social divides and mobility. Disciplinary silos must be broken, and an intercultural approach is needed to integrate touch into digital global societies.

Autonomous vehicles rely on both LiDAR and cameras for perception, with each technology offering unique advantages — cameras provide rich contextual information, whereas LiDAR delivers precise depth data. Understanding their trade-offs is crucial for creating reliable and efficient autonomous vehicles.

Optical wavefront shaping compensates distortions caused by scattering, aberrations or inhomogeneities in optical medium, enabling precise phase control to enhance light penetration in turbid environments. The integrated phase measurement sensor combines light sensing and modulation at pixel level within a single device, thereby reducing alignment constraints and bandwidth limitations.