Even a local mRNA injection can produce unwanted expression in the liver. Researchers have redesigned the lipid nanoparticles that carry mRNA to reduce this spillover in mice while preserving expression in injected muscle. The formulation also supports repeated dosing and improves the confinement of expression after local brain and eye delivery.

Umbilical cord blood is more than a source of stem cells for transplantation. A review in Science China Life Sciences examines how its diverse cells and bioactive components are being explored for cancer immunotherapy, inherited disorders and tissue repair. The authors connect these opportunities with advances in cell expansion, gene engineering and manufacturing, while identifying barriers to clinical translation. They emphasize that many emerging applications still require further evidence of safety, effectiveness and durable benefit.

Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo have developed MatterGen-e^-, a machine learning model for the inverse design of inorganic crystals. The model generates crystal structures with electronic-structure descriptors to match a target property, producing more valid, stable, unique, and novel structures than when the crystal structure is considered alone. Control experiments showed that only physically meaningful electronic descriptors improve stability and validity, whereas diversity increased regardless of the descriptors used.

Researchers have achieved high-fidelity control of multiple silicon spin qubits operating in parallel. Using a five-qubit silicon array controlled through a single shared microwave line, they identified a key source of errors during the simultaneous operation of qubits and developed a way to mitigate its effects. This shows that high-fidelity control can be maintained even when several qubits are operated at the same time and represents an important step toward scaling up silicon-based quantum processors.

Kyoto, Japan -- Structural metals used in engineering projects are expected to have both high strength and high ductility: an ability to withstand heavy loads and deform before failure. Achieving both of these properties at the same time, however, is challenging.

An important measure of ductility is uniform elongation, or the amount of deformation a metal can sustain before it concentrates in one small area, resulting in a fracture. Some metals become stronger as they are deformed -- a phenomenon known as strain hardening -- so if a material can continue to harden sufficiently during deformation, theoretically uniform stretching can be maintained. However, a metal's effectiveness usually decreases as deformation continues. While some advanced metals obtain additional strain hardening from deformation-twinning and martensitic transformation, these processes tend to compete with each other, so metals are commonly designed to rely predominantly on just one or the other.

A team of researchers at Kyoto University wondered if both mechanisms could be activated in the same material at different stages of deformation, and hypothesized this could cause strains to harden sequentially rather than compete with each other. They proposed a strategy in which different deformation mechanisms are activated in sequence, with each providing additional strain hardening as the previous step becomes less effective.

Researchers have developed a novel composite hydrogel film that combines a polyacrylamide and calcium alginate polymer network with in-situ calcium carbonate mineralization. This innovative approach provides a new structural method for regulating film swelling and enabling the controlled release of phycocyanin, a bioactive pigment-protein complex known for its antioxidant and antibacterial properties. The findings, recently published by Frontiers of Materials Science, open promising avenues for advanced biomedical applications, including wound dressings and tissue engineering.

This study proposes a novel transmission framework that integrates a nonlinear companding-based PAPR reduction method with the Digital Post-Distortion (DPoD) technique to balance power efficiency and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. To recover the transmitted signals, a Successive Decision Feedback Nonlinearity Equalizer (SDFNE) is developed at the receiver side. The SDFNE employs a time-domain least squares equalizer with closed-loop iterative feedback to jointly mitigate companding distortion and PA nonlinearity. The proposed framework balances transmitter-side PAPR suppression and receiver-side nonlinear equalization. This enables the PA to operate closer to its saturation point while achieving excellent BER performance. Meanwhile, compliance with spectral emission mask requirements is maintained. Numerical results on diverse PA models demonstrate that the proposed transmission framework with the SDFNE method significantly outperforms conventional nonlinear signal processing methods, including nonlinear companding, digital predistortion, and DPoD. Superior BER performance is achieved in a power-efficient manner, making the proposed framework particularly suitable for resource-constrained communication systems.

A bioinspired bead-on-string Ag/AgCl heterostructure for stable ion-electron transduction in stretchable dry electrodes is developed, opening a route to long-term, high-fidelity wearable electrophysiological monitoring and personalized hands-free human-machine interaction.