A team of engineers at Rice University and Kyung Hee University has developed a soft, shape-shifting mechanical surface that can respond to touch, sense its own movements and visually communicate changes in real time — an advance that could open new possibilities for human-machine interaction, wearable devices and immersive tactile displays.

In May 2024, auroras were observed at unusually low latitudes across the globe, lighting up skies that rarely see such displays. Inside Earth’s magnetosphere, the region of space surrounding our planet and dominated by its intrinsic magnetic field, something significant was finally being observed. It started with a large sunspot firing a rapid series of powerful solar eruptions. Clouds of magnetized plasma merged as they traveled through space and impacted Earth's magnetosphere. No geomagnetic storm this powerful had ever been measured in the Earth’s ring current region, a belt of charged particles in space near our planet. Two sources of ring current ions are known: solar wind and Earth's ionosphere, the electrically charged upper layer of the atmosphere. For decades, scientists have debated how much each source contributes to the ring current. During most storms, both contribute. However, during a storm driven by a dense solar wind, some scientists expected solar wind ions to continue to play a notable role. Yet the first direct measurements of ring current composition from a super geomagnetic storm revealed that solar wind ion contributions were minimal, and the level of Earth-origin ion dominance had never been observed before. The findings, published in Science Advances, suggest that understanding how much Earth's ionosphere contributes to the ring current may be essential to accurately predict the severity of super geomagnetic storms. The dominance of ionospheric ions, which are far heavier than solar wind particles, may have intensified the magnetic disturbance and concentrated the ring current peak unusually close to Earth. The researchers also make a case for a proposed Japanese multi-satellite mission to understand exactly how ion supply processes work.

ORNL developed JACC, an open-source framework that enables Julia applications to run efficiently on CPUs and GPUs from multiple hardware vendors using a single codebase. The software improves performance portability for high-performance computing systems and reduces the need for architecture-specific code.

More accurate navigation systems and improved wireless communications may not come from traditional electronics, but rather from atoms. Researchers at Penn State and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a new way to build tinier, smarter glass sensors filled with highly precise and stable atoms.

The gut microbiome plays an important role in inflammatory bowel disease. In the research project MikrobiomProCheck, researchers are investigating how microbiome data can in future be used for diagnostics, disease monitoring and personalised therapies. Bielefeld University is contributing clinical, bioinformatic and data-driven expertise to this collaborative project spanning North Rhine-Westphalia.

 JMIR Publications invites submissions to a new section titled "Technology in Scientific Publishing" in its open access journal JMIR Metascience and Research Integrity