It has long been thought that only nerve and heart cells use electric impulses to communicate, while epithelial cells — which compose the linings of our skin, organs and body cavities — are mute, serving mostly as protective barriers that can absorb and secrete various substances. But two researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst have upended the status quo by showing that epithelial cells do indeed “talk” to each other, albeit with slow electrical signals. Led by Steve Granick, Robert K. Barrett Professor of Polymer and Science and Engineering, and postdoctoral fellow Sun-Min Yu, the discovery, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could enable new applications for everything from wearable bioelectric sensors to wound healing.

It may someday be possible to listen to a favorite podcast or song without disturbing the people around you, even without wearing headphones. In a new advancement in audio engineering, a team of researchers led by Yun Jing, professor of acoustics in the Penn State College of Engineering, has precisely narrowed where sound is perceived by creating localized pockets of sound zones, called audible enclaves. In an enclave, a listener can hear sound, while others standing nearby cannot, even if the people are in an enclosed space, like a vehicle, or standing directly in front of the audio source.

Prof. Zilong Zhang,Feifei Cui's team from Hainan University and Quan Zou's team from University of Electronic Science and Technology of China collaborated to build a model that can comprehensively predict the relative abundance of multiple proteins in the protein corona by using machine learning, and provide the corresponding web service, so as to make the established model have practical application value.

A team of scientists led by Haotian Wang, associate professor in chemical and biomolecular engineering at the George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing at Rice University, and Xiaonan Shan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at University of Houston, have discovered simple yet elegant solutions to address a fundamental issue in carbon capture and utilization technology — carbon dioxide reduction reaction (CO₂RR). The study was published recently in Nature Energy.

In a new study published in Nano Letters, researchers at the University of Rochester show that precisely layering nano-thin materials creates excitons—essentially, artificial atoms—that can act as quantum information bits, or qubits.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany developed a single-cell green microalgae coated with magnetic material. This miniature robot was put to the test: would the microalgae with its magnetic coating be able to swim through narrow spaces and, additionally, in a viscous fluid that mimics those found in the human body? Would the tiny robot be able to fight its way through these difficult conditions? The team's research has now been published in the journal Matter.

MIT engineers developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple, coordinated directions. These tissues could be useful for building “biohybrid” robots powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers.