Skeletal muscles grow and regenerate as individual precursor cells – called myoblasts – fuse into long fibers from which mature muscle fibers develop. How they coordinate this process and form functional muscles is not yet fully understood. A research team at the Max-Planck-Zentrum für Physik und Medizin (MPZPM) has now shown that mechanical stress influences the fusion of muscle cells. The results, published in Nature Communications, reveal an interaction between the organization of muscle cells, the surrounding intercellular space, mechanical stress, and muscle growth.

Scientists have developed a new type of glowing liquid that could help create harder-to-copy security markings for products, documents and other valuable items.

Biomass offers a renewable source of carbon for producing energy and valuable chemicals, but conventional thermochemical conversion can be limited by energy consumption, heating efficiency and product selectivity. In a review published in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, researchers examine how electromagnetic induction heating can address some of these challenges. The article surveys its applications in biomass pyrolysis, gasification, reforming and the catalytic upgrading of biomass-derived platform molecules. The review highlights reported improvements in heating rates and energy efficiency, as well as the potential of magnetic catalysts to influence reaction performance. It also identifies important barriers to industrial implementation, including reactor scale-up, incomplete multiphysics modelling and the need for long-term operational validation.

Three-dimensional shape sensing is critical for soft robotics, medical navigation, and intelligent perception systems, yet existing high-performance approaches typically rely on multicore fibers or multiple sensing channels. Researchers from Northwest University have developed a deformation-encoding strategy based on femtosecond-laser-inscribed misplaced orthogonal eccentric scatterers, enabling a standard single-mode fiber to reconstruct complex 3D shapes using only a single interrogation channel. The work establishes a new pathway toward miniaturized, high-density, and highly integrated optical fiber sensing systems.

Infrared adaptive optical systems that correct aberrations via deformable mirrors are critical for astronomy, defense, and industry fields. To this end, scientists in China invented a chain‑ring dual‑network chalcogenide glass that combine broadband infrared-transparent with polymer-like flexibility, which overcomes the long-standing material trade-off. Based on this novel material, they fabricated infrared deformable lenses with real‑time aberration correction, opening new pathways for infrared adaptive optical technology.

Tomomichi Itoh and his colleagues at Ehime University have shown how tiny light-induced molecular shape changes can be amplified into visible deformation of polymer microparticles. The team developed light-responsive particles containing azobenzene molecules and revealed how structural changes triggered by light spread through the material, ultimately deforming particles several to tens of micrometers in size. These findings provide new insights for designing light-driven microscale materials and devices.

To build faster and more energy-efficient computers, researchers need to understand nanoscale magnetic materials. But looking inside these tiny magnets is surprisingly difficult: modern microscopes only measure the magnetic field outside the material, not the magnetic pattern inside. Because many different internal patterns can produce the exact same field, working backwards has long been a challenge. Physicists at the University of Vienna, together with colleagues in Dresden, Singapore, and Ulsan, have now solved this problem by building the laws of physics directly into modern machine learning methods. Their method reveals the realistic magnetic structure and even determines the precise distance between the sensor and the sample. The study is published in Physical Review Letters, and the software is freely available as open source.