To see if a fish is fresh, people recommend looking at its eyes and gills or giving it a sniff. But a more accurate check for food quality and safety is to look for compounds that form when decomposition starts. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Sensors have developed a simple, effective electronic device that quickly measures one of these compounds. The prototype sensor can determine how fresh a fish is in less than two minutes.

In International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, researchers from Tsinghua University proposed a novel tip-based vibration carving processing method for shape-customized convex microstructures for the first time. Their work combined the advantages of tip-based machining and vibration texturing, showing great potential in the convex microstructure processing of customized functional surfaces. Such method will significantly expand the design boundaries of functional surfaces to address the challenges in thermal, electrical, acoustic, and optical fields.

A researcher from the University of Tokyo and a U.S.-based structural engineer developed a new computational form-finding method that could change how architects and engineers design lightweight and free-form structures covering large spaces. The technique specifically helps create gridshells, thin, curved surfaces whose members form a networked grid. The method makes use of NURBS surfaces, a widely used surface representation format in computer-aided design (CAD). It also drastically reduces computation cost — a task that previously took 90 hours on a high-end GPU completes in about 90 minutes on a standard CPU.

Silicon anodes can greatly boost the energy density of all-solid-state batteries, but their large volume changes often cause contact loss with solid electrolytes. Using operando synchrotron X-ray micro- and nano-computed tomography, researchers at Ritsumeikan University directly visualized the 3D evolution of the silicon–electrolyte interface during charge and discharge cycling. They found that even as silicon expands and shrinks, the thin, solid-electrolyte layers remain adhered, preserving partial ion pathways and enabling stable operation.

Delft University of Technology 3D‑prints new smart material that breaks piezoelectric limits

By changing the structure of piezoelectrical materials and 3D-printing them, a research team at TU Delft, led by Saurav Sharma, has created a new type of smart material: piezoelectric truss metamaterials. These overcome the natural limitations of conventional piezoelectric materials, greatly improving their functionalities and applications. They can for example be used to create safer medical diagnostics and implants, better underwater sensors, more capable soft robots and noise cancelling sensors. The team published their findings in the Nature publication npj Metamaterials in December 2025.

Kyoto, Japan -- Shisei Tei claims he is clumsy with technology and doesn't even own a smartphone, yet he has found himself thinking a lot about what we call generative AI.

Tei is cautious rather than optimistic about AI. As a researcher, he uses it to help with analyzing psychiatric data, and outside work it helps him plan personalized hikes. But Tei is concerned that AI will change how we think about death, which he discusses in a chapter he wrote for the book SecondDeath: Experiences of Death Across Technologies.

"Today, I often see how AI reframes grief and remembrance," says Tei. Though he thinks mental health chatbots have the potential to lower barriers to care, maladaptive use of chatbots that reconstruct deceased individuals can distort our perceptions of death and existence.