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Nanostructure fragility limits applications. The authors develop a tribochemical surface reconstruction strategy to build single-crystal nanostructures on sapphire, which retain bulk-level wear resistance and improve triboelectric device performance.

Water-floating nanotransfer printing (WF-nTP) is proposed for transferring nanostructures onto three-dimensional substrates. Using WFnTP, an Au SERS nanomesh for pesticide detection on plants and a Pd-based hydrogen gas sensor are demonstrated.

Bio-interfaced applications are limited by the transfer of soft electronic devices onto high curvature and fragile surfaces. Here, the authors develop a stress-responsive transfer fluid that enables distortion-free, adhesion-switchable transfer for conformal integration and stable real-time bioelectronic sensing.

The authors report multifunctional and multimodal sensing embodied in a soft gripper with integrated vision and touch that measures fruit size, shape and firmness, accurately assessing ripeness and harvesting strawberries and delicate fruits.

Bubble–wall collisions exhibit several regimes including bouncing, damped adhesion, and breakup. Here, the authors devise a unified double mass-spring-damper model explains the governing physics and provides design principles for bubble impact processes.

The chemical stability of fluorinated polymers leads to long-term environmental persistence, rendering end-of-life management essential. Here the authors report a fluorinated photoresist that enables tomographic volumetric 3D printing with closed loop chemical recycling of its fluorinated content.

High-strength lightweight steels are vital for saving energy and enhancing safety in engineering applications. Here, the authors tune atomic-scale strain waves in a steel alloy to expand dislocation storage capacity, significantly enhancing strength-ductility synergy.

Here, the authors design a self-optimizing experimental system for the automatic discovery of lightweight and high‑strength plate‑lattice metamaterials, integrating a robotic platform with a machine learning framework.

The study demonstrates dynamic stabilization of a mechanical oscillator switching between two unstable modes using time-modulated stiffness and damping. It provides theoretical and experimental evidence of antiresonance windows, enabling stability without any stable mode or average.

Turbulent flow modeling remains a significant challenge due to the computational expense and difficulty in accurately capturing fine-scale structures. This work introduces an adversarially trained neural operator that effectively combines operator learning with generative modeling, achieving substantial improvements in spatio-temporal super resolution, forecasting, and sparse flow reconstruction, thereby enabling accurate and efficient analysis of turbulent flows.

Authors present a bionic robotic trunk with a cable-driven tensegrity skeleton, leveraging synergistic and antagonistic muscle-mimicking mechanisms to achieve rapid and large-range stiffness modulation comparable to that of an elephant trunk.

Robotic grippers struggle to handle fragile and varied objects across environments. Here, the authors introduce a liquid metal gripper that adapts its shape and stiffness for gentle, multiscale grasping and active release.

The complexity of phononic metamaterials design, fabrication and modeling grows with the sample size. Here, authors introduce a scalable design based on spatially graded, modular metamaterials on a silicon wafer and fabricate samples consisting of more than a hundred-thousand unit cells, with the demonstrated potential to scale up with no change in protocol.

Nanoscale thickness strongly enhances the converse flexoelectric effect, as the electric field gradient scales quadratically with decreasing thickness. This study demonstrates a two-dimensional material-based converse flexoelectric actuator.

Surface cleaning is needed in various industrial systems but remains water intensive due to low water utilization efficiency. This study proposes a method—liquid droplet mops—that can efficiently clean superhydrophobic-coated solar panels with substantially reduced water consumption.

A fully self-powered wireless arm interface converts human motion into electrical signals and wireless commands using a compact triboelectric nanogenerator, enabling battery-free, real-time robotic arm control for industrial and human–machine applications.

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.

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.

Limited muscle force hampers progress in biohybrid robots. The authors present an autonomous self‑training platform that strengthens engineered muscles, enabling high‑force actuators that power a fast and precisely controlled swimming robot.

Jiao et al. introduce a generalized safety measure for autonomous driving systems that learns collision risk from everyday driving without labels. It accurately warns in real time of crashes and near-crashes and secures time for an early reaction.

Mechanical frequency combs are promising for precision measurements, sensing, and metrology blew Gigahertz. Here, authors introduce a magneto-mechanical frequency comb including its integer- and half-integer-harmonic combs via magnetostrictive effect with the teeth spacing that can be continuously tuned.

Developing polymer composites which combine high strength, toughness, and impact resistance remains challenging. Here the authors propose a toughening strategy that integrates a trabecular interlock architecture with a stress-adaptive interface to enable efficient energy dissipation under mechanical loading.

Joshua Dupont and colleagues report a tunable electromagnetic unit cell to remotely impose local resonance in conductive media. Analytical and experimental studies of the coupled system show selective wave blocking and modal vibration suppression

Magnetic microrobot control typically trades off between the simplicity of permanent magnets and the controllability of electromagnetic systems. Kiana Abolfathi and colleagues introduce a tunable magnetic end effector that combines permanent magnets with switchable, spatially controllable magnetic fields for precise medical manipulation.

A 3D soft electronic mesh allows high-resolution electrical recording and stimulation across the full surface of neural organoids, enabling long-term studies, drug testing and optogenetic control without compromising their viability owing to its porous design.

The authors report suspended Lamb-wave resonators using sub-100 nm ultrathin lithium niobate, achieving resonant frequencies of nearly 220 GHz-doubling prior records and holding exciting prospects for terahertz nanomechanics.

Dynamic, reversible thermal switches are essential for thermal management of power electronics. Here, authors propose a bistable origami thermal switch that achieves a high switching ratio without requiring external energy or sensory input, validated across various applications.

High-speed imaging reveals that the squeak of soft–rigid frictional interfaces, like sneakers sliding on a basketball court, arises from intersonic opening slip pulses—analogous to earthquake ruptures—that thin ridges on the rubber confine to repeat at a musical frequency.

A method is described for the manufacture of pivoting colloidal assemblies comprising rotating diamond and rotating triangle geometries that show tunable folding and unfolding by thermal fluctuations and actuation by magnetic attractions.

Self-propelled jumping of droplets becomes more challenging as droplet size increases. In this study, the authors report passive jumping of a water puddle at an unprecedented centimeter scale from a superhydrophobic surface, triggered by the burst of an entrained bubble.

Nature evolves intricate surfaces/interfaces to achieve high energy efficiency, providing a promising, low-carbon solution to energy crisis. This Review explores diverse energy processes in nature and how to translate nature’s inspiration to efficiently harvest energy from water, sunlight, heat and their hybrids, especially through interfacial engineering.

Wang et al. introduce MicroSyn-X, a synthetic X-ray data generation framework that overcomes data scarcity in miniature medical devices, enabling robust deep learning-based tracking and real-time robotic navigation in challenging surgical settings.

This study presents an interfacial stress decoupling strategy using dithiol-based self-assembled layers enabling stable palladium hydrogen sensing, demonstrating wafer-scale device fabrication and seamless integration of a portable detection platform.

The Willis coupling vectors offer a novel approach to manipulating acoustic waves, yet their practical implementation remains challenging. Here, the authors present an active metamaterial capable of rapid time modulation of Willis vectors, demonstrating nonreciprocal filtering and steerable beamforming, thus unlocking new possibilities for dynamic wave control.