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Knowing how moving droplets dissipate energy is important for designing superhydrophobic surfaces, but measuring such small energy losses is challenging. Timonen et al.develop a technique to do this, which monitors freely decaying and resonant oscillations of moving magnetic droplets.

Lubricated surfaces are known to display extreme liquid repellency. Such behaviour is now confirmed to be due to the formation of a film between the surface and the repelled liquid, with a thickness profile following the Landau–Levich–Derjaguin law.

A concentration cell that produces voltages of ~0.5 V for 100 hours can be created by tethering redox-active molecules to magnetic nanoparticles and then using them to maintain a sharp concentration gradient with the help of an external magnetic field.

Phase separation is driven by the component activity, elasticity, or composition of a homogeneous mixture. Here the authors, develop heterogeneous colloidal suspensions exhibiting both liquid-liquid phase separation of polymers and liquid crystal phase separation of nanoparticles controlled by the trade-off between thermodynamics and kinetics.

Mechanical stiffness and self-healing properties are difficult to combine in synthetic hydrogels. Using polymer entanglements in co-planar nanoconfinement, stiff and self-healing hydrogels are fabricated, with applications in biology and engineering.

High-content screening prompted the development of software enabling discrete phenotypic analysis of single cells. Here, the authors show that supervised continuous machine learning can drive novel discoveries in diverse imaging experiments and present the Regression Plane module of Advanced Cell Classifier.

Trapped films of air known as plastrons are promising for underwater engineering but typically have short lifetimes. Here, aerophilic titanium alloy surfaces are developed with thermodynamically stabilized plastrons for antifouling applications.

By infusing a ferrofluid into a microstructured matrix and applying a magnetic field, dynamic, multiscale topographical reconfigurations emerge, enabling functions such as colloidal self-assembly, switchable adhesion and friction, and biofilm removal.

Axisymmetric sessile liquid drops are everywhere around us and important in numerous technological applications. Here the authors experimentally prepare quasi-two-dimensional sessile drops and show that they display many similar features as the traditional axisymmetric sessile drops, including analogous equilibrium shape, dynamics, and instabilities.

Samuli Ripatti and colleagues report the results of a genome-wide association study for circulating lipid levels based on 1000 Genomes Project imputation. Their results implicate several new loci, refine the association signals at many established loci and highlight the impact of low-frequency variants on lipid traits.

Mechanical forces within the cell’s environment play a crucial role in their growth, differentiation and behaviour. Here, the authors develop a photothermal responsive cell culture substrate for the assessment of how cell growth can be affected by manipulating the strain profile of the substrate.

Ferrofluids are magnetic liquids interesting for the periodic patterns they form in external magnetic fields. Here, an aqueous two-phase system based on polyethylene glycol and dextran achieves an ultralow interfacial tension of ~ 1 μN m⁻¹, resulting in micro-patterns with periodicities of ~ 200 μm.

The authors present a new methodology to control collective behavior in active systems by introducing a magnetic medium (ferrofluid) into a dense bacterial suspension undergoing active turbulence. This allows applying magnetic torque on bacteria, leading to long-range nematic orientation ordering and direct measurement of inherent hydrodynamic instabilities.

Condensates with a shell can be formed by liquid-liquid phase separation and can burst like viscous bubbles by nucleation and growth of a hole in the shell surrounded by a rim. The authors develop a model to extract a broad range of rheological properties for spherical shells to understand the conditions for bursting.

Hydrophobic coatings are increasingly important in modern technology, but hard to study in the extreme non-wetting limit. Here, micropipette force sensors can directly measure nN-scale friction forces and, combined with particle image velocimetry, reveal pure rolling dynamics of slow water droplets.

Surface wetting describes the interaction between a solid surface and a liquid droplet, the dynamics of which govern the performance of functional surfaces for nanoscience and industrial applications. Here, the authors review how a combination of new surface characterization techniques allows the probing of surface wettability in greater detail compared to conventional methods (e.g., contact angle measurement).