UNSW researchers have developed a soft robotic model of the human heart that can mimic disease and provide a realistic environment for testing the next generation of cardiac devices.

Perfluorooctane sulfonate, or PFOS, is one of the most persistent members of the PFAS family of “forever chemicals.” Widely detected in groundwater, surface water, and drinking water sources, PFOS is difficult to remove because of its extremely strong carbon-fluorine bonds and high chemical stability. Now, researchers have developed a new biochar-based material that not only captures PFOS from water, but also helps destroy it through light-driven reactions.

As countries expand nuclear power to support low-carbon energy goals, securing a stable supply of uranium has become an increasingly important scientific and environmental challenge. A new review published in Biochar examines how biochar-based porous materials could provide a more sustainable route for selectively separating uranium from complex water systems, including seawater, salt lakes, groundwater, and nuclear wastewater.

This peer-reviewed invited review recasts traumatic brain injury not as a single bruise to the head but as a system-wide disorder that ripples through the lungs, heart, kidneys, and gut. Synthesizing evidence from rodents, swine, and nonhuman primates through early human case reports, the authors examine mesenchymal stromal cell-derived extracellular vesicles, the tiny membrane-bound parcels cells shed to talk to one another. The synthesis reveals that these vesicles can quiet inflammation, blunt cell death, and coax new vessels and neurons. The authors map cargo engineering, delivery routes, and artificial intelligence-guided design while flagging the standardization gaps that still separate promise from practice.

Why do nearly all animals sleep? A new Perspective in Brain Medicine gathers evidence from neuroimaging, electrophysiology, and machine learning to propose an answer that sits above the familiar ones. The authors synthesize existing research to argue that sleep operates as a system-level resilience mechanism, stabilizing large-scale brain dynamics, curbing maladaptive over-specialization, and preserving efficient information flow. NREM and REM stages emerge as coordinated phases of repair and reconfiguration. The same logic, the authors suggest, may extend to artificial neural networks, where structured offline phases could ease catastrophic forgetting. Sleep, in this reading, is active maintenance rather than passive rest.