From creating flexible gadgets to better medicines, the art of bending crystals is reshaping technology and health, and at the University of Houston a crystals expert makes it look almost like a magic trick. 

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.

In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the streams are telling us a story about forest recovery following acid rain and logging. According to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, long-term watershed chemistry reveals that recovering forests are mining rocks for nutrients. While this leads to improved pH in nearby streams, it further depletes soils, leaving forests less resilient to future pollution.  The study team analyzed more than 60 years of data from the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, established by the US Forest Service in the 1950s for ecological and hydrologic research.

A Harvard study shows that commercially available sensors worn on a runner's body can provide useful data on what researchers call ground-reaction forces. These insights could open avenues to devices and products that deliver this data in real time to help runners avoid injury and improve their form.

With the help of a five-year, nearly $1.98 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) (R35) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, researchers at Wayne State University aim to make strides in understanding how proteins move and interact in living cells through the development of next-generation computational modeling tools.

Around a hundred times more heat is transferred between objects that are only a few molecular diameters apart than physics theory predicts. This phenomenon, first observed several years ago, has now been confirmed by a research team at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, using highly accurate measurements. In the current issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, the researchers report that they cannot yet explain the cause of this effect physically. The study could pave the way for better temperature control in nanosystems, for example in electronics or optics.