Professor Chuanmin Hu, of the University of South Florida College of Marine Science’s Optical Oceanography Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of The Oceanography Society (TOS), one of the Society’s highest honors, recognizing outstanding and sustained contributions to the field of oceanography through scientific excellence, leadership, service, and commitment to education and public engagement. Dr. Hu will be recognized at The Oceanography Society Honors Breakfast, February 24, 2026, during the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Koç University in Istanbul have created hydrogel-based artificial cilia that move almost exactly like real biological cilia – the closest imitation achieved so far. The researchers can program each micrometer-sized cilium to move freely in space – just like cilia in the human body. With their research, the scientists aim to investigate how natural cilia function, how they coordinate their movement, and what role they play in brain development, signal perception, and fluid movement, for example. Because the artificial cilia are soft and easy to control, they could one day be used in medical devices to help people whose natural cilia are damaged or not working properly. The fast, low-voltage motion demonstrated in their study could also inspire a new generation of tiny robots that were previously impossible at such small scales. This milestone work will be published in Nature on January 14, 2026.

The organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology behind flexible cell phones, curved monitors, and televisions could one day be used to make on-skin sensors that show changes in temperature, blood flow, and pressure in real time. An international collaboration, led by researchers from Seoul National University in the Republic of Korea and Drexel University, has developed a flexible and stretchable OLED that could put the technology on track for this use and a range of new applications.

A new study reports first-time use of artificial intelligence for genetic circuit design.

A joint research team led by Tae‑Woo Lee, Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University, and Yury Gogotsi, Professor at Drexel University, has overcome long-standing limitations of next-generation stretchable light-emitting devices by developing the record efficiency fully stretchable organic light-emitting diode (OLED). The study was published in Nature on January 15.

Bonn, January 14, 2026 – Researchers from Bonn and Basel have developed a new method to equip human retinal organoids – small, lab-grown models of the retina – with artificial blood vessel structures. These vascularized retinal organoids, called vROs, preserve inner retinal cell types and for the first time, form fully functional light-signal pathways from photoreceptors to retinal ganglion cells.

A novel liquid biopsy technology is set to advance cancer diagnostics and monitoring by overcoming the long-standing challenge of simultaneously achieving high sensitivity, broad coverage, and simple workflow. A team of researchers from Genomill Health Inc., the University of Turku, and the TYKS Turku University Hospital, Finland, benchmarked this new method, Bridge Capture, against two market-leading tools Their analysis, appearing in The Journal of Molecular Diagnostics, published by Elsevier, highlights the method’s simplicity, cost-efficiency, reproducibility, and scalability, making it well suited for routine clinical testing, disease monitoring, and treatment selection.