A team of researchers from the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, the Military University of Technology, and the Institut Pascal at Université Clermont Auvergne has developed a novel method for using cholesteric liquid crystals in optical microcavities. The platform created by the researchers enables the formation and dynamic tuning of photonic crystals with integrated spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and controlled laser emission. The results of this groundbreaking research have been published in the renowned journal Laser & Photonics Reviews.

Esophageal adenocarcinoma (EAC) is the sixth most deadly cancer worldwide for which no effective targeted therapy exists. Patients need to rely on chemotherapy which is started ahead of surgical interventions in the hope to shrink or control tumors. However, most patients become resistant to certain NACTs, leading to poor outcomes.

To enable clinicians to rapidly test different chemotherapies and determine the best treatment courses, Wyss Institute researchers and their collaborators at McGill University have developed a precision oncology Organ Chip platform that accurately and actionably predicts chemotherapy responses of individual patients with EAC in a clinically useful timeframe.

For 50 years, scientists believed that schools of fish would save the most energy by swimming in flat diamond formations. A team of researchers at Princeton and Harvard ran an experiment that found fish don’t swim in diamonds but rather in a dynamic pattern that the researchers call a ladder, where they’re staggered in three dimensions. The finding has implications for both biology and robotics.

A Nagoya University team has overcome one of the key limitations of X-ray technology by making the mirror using only a single-crystal piezoelectric thin wafer instead of the usual two-part structure. Using this technique, they changed X-ray beam size by more than 3,400 times. This improved dynamic range massively improves both imaging and analysis, improving the efficiency of advanced techniques and massively enhancing workflows.

Abandoned termite mounds are a newly discovered microhabitat for diverse insect groups in both undisturbed rainforest and areas that have been logged in the past.