Drones can now detect subtle soybean canopy damage from dicamba at one ten-thousandth of the herbicide’s label rate — simulating vapor drift — eight days after application. This advancement in remote sensing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides a science-based tool to accurately detect and report crop damage at the field scale, reducing human error and bias. 

To deepen international academic collaboration and enhance the global impact of the journal, Yuan Qing, Party Secretary of the School of Medical Technology at Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine; Dai Jing, Deputy Director of the Department of Laboratory Medicine at Ruijin Hospital; and Wang Erliang, Director of the Editorial Office of LabMed Discovery (LMD), recently traveled to Europe for a series of academic exchanges. Centered on the core goals of "expanding cooperation, absorbing high-quality manuscript sources, and promoting scientific research projects", the delegation achieved significant outcomes through participation in international conferences, visits to leading institutions, and in-depth academic dialogues—injecting fresh momentum into the journal’s international development.

Devices taking advantage of the collective quantum behavior of spin excitations in magnetic materials - known as "magnons" - have the potential to improve quantum computing devices. However, using magnons in quantum devices requires in-depth understanding of their nature and limitations. A new experimental technique uses superconducting qubits to sensitively characterize magnon behavior in previously unexplored regimes.

In combat zones and emergency rescues, rapid evacuation and treatment can mean the difference between life and death. But prolonged immobilization during transport poses another life-threatening risk: pressure injuries.

A newly developed adaptive spine board (ASB) overlay aims to change that, offering an innovative solution to prevent pressure injuries and dramatically improve patient outcomes. Developed by researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington and UT Southwestern Medical School, the adaptive spine board sits atop a standard stretcher or spine board, using air-cell technology to redistribute pressure more effectively than traditional evacuation surfaces. The team’s newly published study shows the ASB outperforms other immobilization options.

Joint health is critical for musculoskeletal (MSK) conditions that are affecting approximately one-third of the global population. Monitoring of joint torque can offer an important pathway for the evaluation of joint health and guided intervention. However, there is no technology that can provide the precision, effectiveness, low-resource setting, and long-term wearability to simultaneously achieve both rapid and accurate joint torque measurement to enable risk assessment of joint injury and long-term monitoring of joint rehabilitation in wider environments. Herein, we propose a piezoelectric boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs)-based, AI-enabled wearable device for regular monitoring of joint torque. We first adopted an iterative inverse design to fabricate the wearable materials with a Poisson’s ratio precisely matched to knee biomechanics. A highly sensitive piezoelectric film was constructed based on BNNTs and polydimethylsiloxane and applied to precisely capture the knee motion, while concurrently realizing self-sufficient energy harvesting. With the help of a lightweight on-device artificial neural network, the proposed wearable device was capable of accurately extracting targeted signals from the complex piezoelectric outputs and then effectively mapping these signals to their corresponding physical characteristics, including torque, angle, and loading. A real-time platform was constructed to demonstrate the capability of fine real-time torque estimation. This work offers a relatively low-cost wearable solution for effective, regular joint torque monitoring that can be made accessible to diverse populations in countries and regions with heterogeneous development levels, potentially producing wide-reaching global implications for joint health, MSK conditions, ageing, rehabilitation, personal health, and beyond.