From small soft machines to muscle-powered pumps, biohybrid robots are expanding possibilities in medicine and engineering. In a review for the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Dr. Su Ryon Shin and her team at Harvard Medical School highlight advances in biofabrication, from 3D bioprinting to microfluidics that integrate living muscle cells with robotic systems. Their roadmap outlines how these technologies could move biohybrid robotics from lab concepts to real-world tools for regenerative medicine, drug testing, and disease modeling.

Looking for precision in complex manufacturing? A new hybrid measurement system for drill bits combines advanced 2D and 3D imaging techniques to deliver accurate and efficient results. Discover how this innovative approach could transform tool measurement and boost manufacturing efficiency.

Titanium (Ti) is a promising metal for biomedical implant applications owing to lightweight, superior corrosion resistance and biocompatibility. Unfortunately, Ti is besieged by poor wear resistance owing to inferior plastic shear-resistance and strain-hardening capacity, thus causing premature failure upon joint friction.

Looking for new ways to tap into cleaner energy sources? Researchers have come up with a clever method to extract natural gas from underwater hydrate reservoirs by using geothermal energy. Could this be the key to more efficient and affordable energy production? Dive into the full story to find out!

Introducing Genos, an open genomic foundation model for high-quality human genomes across global populations, built to advance understanding of the genome and its diversity. Genos achieves single-nucleotide precision over a context of 1 million bases and uses a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture that is practical to deploy and economical to run. We provide two variants, 10B and 1.2B, so teams can match compute and latency needs. Trained on 636 high-quality assemblies representing diverse ancestries, with ~1.6T training tokens for the 1.2B model and ~2.2T for the 10B model, Genos learns the genome itself and generalizes to population-scale analyses. With efficient routing and scalable inference, Genos connects sequence to function and powers tools for discovery and diagnostics, and a complementary 4B multimodal language model pairs genomic signals with text to enable omics-aware reasoning in those tools. Explore code, weights, and docs on GitHub, Hugging Face, ModelScope, and zero2x.

Transparent solar cells can be integrated into windows, screens and other surfaces, with immense potential for them to revolutionise the renewable energy sector. However, there are challenges to overcome, one of which is balancing transparency with power conversion efficiency. Semi-transparent organic photovoltaics (ST-OPVs) that offer the dual advantages of efficient energy generation and visually appealing design are thus attracting significant research interest.

A research team has unveiled the molecular mechanism behind the fading of lilac (Syringa oblata) flowers, a long-standing mystery in ornamental plant biology. 

Blackcurrant, a berry crop prized for its vitamin C and antioxidant content, faces severe yield losses when exposed to drought stress. 

How can traditional coal-fired power plants adapt to the fluctuating nature of renewable energy? A new pre-gasification burner technology offers a solution, enhancing flexibility and stability even at ultra-low loads. Learn how this innovative approach could transform power plant operations and support a more sustainable energy future.

As the demand for high-quality, healthy solid-state lighting (SSL) grows, violet-light-excited full-spectrum lighting has emerged as a promising solution—it avoids blue light hazards and mimics natural sunlight. However, the critical yellow luminescent materials for this scheme are extremely scarce, plagued by low violet-light absorption and poor photoluminescent quantum yield (PLQY). To address this gap, a research team developed glass network engineering for the B₂O₃-BaO-Sc₂O₃ system, successfully fabricating violet-light-excitable yellow-emitting Ba₂Sc₂B₄O₁₁ (BSB):Ce³⁺ glass ceramics (GCs) with a record PLQY of 95.0% and superior thermal, moisture, and irradiation stability. By optimizing the [BO₃]/[BO₄] ratio, the team promoted heterogeneous nucleation during in-situ crystallization, forming well-crystallized BSB nanocrystals (NCs) in the glass matrix. This advancement enabled the construction of LED/LD-driven full-spectrum light sources with a color rendering index (CRI) exceeding 93, accelerating the development of sun-like lighting technology.