For centuries, human beings have dreamed to make objects invisible. With the help of metamaterials, such an invisibility device has no longer existed only in scientific fictions. However, metamaterial invisibility devices generally require complex designs, and are hence difficult to fabricate at large scales. The research team took advantage of fluid channel engineering and implemented experimentally a metamaterial-free invisibility cloak able to render an object undetectable under the fluid flow.

Egg white is one of the most important protein ingredients for the food industry. The first assessment of the environmental impact of egg white protein – ovalbumin – production by fungus Trichoderma reesei shows that the ovalbumin produced by precision fermentation reduced land use requirements by almost 90 per cent and greenhouse gases by 31–55 per cent compared to the production of its chicken-based counterpart.

It is one of the humans’ desired goals that we want to precisely control the heat transport as the level as that we can control the electrical current. However, a high-performance thermal rectifier or thermal diode is still missing. Currently, researchers at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) have demonstrated a promising asymmetric graphene nanomesh device that shows a high thermal rectification ratio at low temperatures. The experiment provides a practical guideline for developing a high-efficiency thermal rectifier based on graphene nanomesh structure. The findings are published in IOP Nano Futures.

All-solid-state batteries are now one step closer to becoming the powerhouse of next-generation electronics as researchers from Tokyo Tech, AIST, and Yamagata University introduce a strategy to restore their low electrical resistance. They also explore the underlying reduction mechanism, paving the way for a more fundamental understanding of the workings of all-solid-state lithium batteries.

Researchers led by the University of Tsukuba developed a computational approach for simulating interactions between matter and light at the atomic scale. The team tested their method by modeling light–matter interactions in a thin film of amorphous silicon dioxide, composed of more than 10,000 atoms, using the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku. The proposed approach is highly efficient and could be used to study a wide range of phenomena in nanoscale optics and photonics.