Research from Queen Mary University of London explores how combining learner autonomy with student-led enquiry can create a more engaging and collaborative experience for international students learning academic English.

Accurate color matching is essential for achieving aesthetically realistic outcomes in dental crown and bridge restorations. Traditional visual methods, however, are often affected by lighting variations and observer subjectivity, which can result in inconsistent color matching, including metameric mismatches under changing illumination. Hyperspectral imaging can provide the spectral reflectance of teeth, but existing spatial-scanning or filter-based systems are typically bulky and time-consuming, limiting their suitability for real-time clinical use. Snapshot hyperspectral imaging captures multispectral information in a single exposure, yet many existing reconstruction algorithms rely primarily on data-driven approaches without explicitly accounting for the underlying physics of image formation, limiting their generalizability and interpretability.

Passive muscle stiffness is a risk factor for muscle strain injuries. Stretching, heat, and vibration have been evaluated on superficial muscles, but approaches for decreasing stiffness in deeper muscles remain unclear. In a recent study, researchers from Japan showed that 10 minutes of ultrasound stimulation can reduce stiffness in a deep calf muscle called the soleus, hinting at a promising non-invasive strategy for managing deep muscle stiffness, with potential future application in sports injury prevention.

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM), with its excellent optical sectioning capability and deep tissue penetration, has become an important tool for neuroscience and biomedical imaging. However, efficient axial information acquisition remains a major challenge for high-speed volumetric imaging of dynamic biological processes. Recent advances in optical devices, light-field control, information encoding, and intelligent computing have expanded the approaches to axial imaging, ranging from single-point scanning and multifocal parallel imaging to continuous-beam coverage. This review summarizes these developments from the perspective of axial information acquisition, and further discusses light-field control for improving 3D imaging performance, providing an overview of the field and its future directions toward faster, deeper, and higher-quality volumetric MPM. Meanwhile, the focal control, temporal encoding, structured light fields, and computational reconstruction methods discussed in this review are highly transferable and can be extended to other laser-scanning microscopy modalities, such as coherent Raman and photoacoustic microscopy.

Researchers developed a nanophotonic processor via monolithicly integrating symmetry-broken quasi-bound states in the continuum (BIC) metasurfaces with GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum wells (MQWs). By leveraging light-matter interaction, the leaky mode of quasi-BIC makes the vertical-field light absorption possible in MQW. A nonlinear photoresponse is driven by changing asymmetry parameter, while linear scenario by incident angle and bias voltage. Implementing multifunctional BIC-MQWs into an artificial neural network provides a new hardware paradigm for machine vision applications.