Eye AI is moving fast, but will it work for people living at high altitude? In a study accepted by Science Bulletin, Dr. Wu Yuan’s team found that leading ophthalmic foundation models can lose accuracy across high-altitude retinal image cohorts. The team developed MIXFound, a lightweight way to combine several models and make AI diagnosis more robust in underrepresented settings.

On-chip photonic systems for generating vectorial optical fields (VOFs) are highly desired, yet conventional devices remain bulky and lack control capabilities. A class of surface-wave-excited complex-amplitude metasurfaces is proposed that can independently control the amplitude, phase, and polarization of locally scattered waves, thereby generating predefined VOFs. The platform significantly expands degrees of freedom in optical field manipulation, paving the way for integrated optics applications such as encrypted holography, augmented reality, super-resolution imaging, and information communication.

For children with early-onset progressive high myopia, the concern is not limited to stronger glasses or longer eyeballs. Over time, high myopia can be associated with structural changes at the back of the eye, including fundus tessellation, choroidal thinning, and myopic maculopathy. These changes may accumulate over many years and increase the risk of future visual impairment. This means that evaluating high myopia interventions should not rely only on refractive error and axial length, but should also consider whether the fundus is undergoing early structural deterioration.  A study published in Eye Discovery provides new evidence from this perspective. Researchers from the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University and the Key Laboratory of Myopia and Related Eye Diseases evaluated three-year changes in refractive status, axial length, and quantitative fundus parameters in children with progressive high myopia who underwent posterior scleral reinforcement (PSR). The procedure used a crosslinked bovine pericardial patch, with the aim of reinforcing the posterior part of the eye and exploring its potential effect on high myopia-related fundus changes.

A research team led by Wenyan Li and Yanfeng Jiang at Fudan University has published study in ENT Discovery, quantifying how lifestyle influences hearing impairment and dissecting the mediating roles of inflammatory and metabolic biomarkers. Based on 441,844 UK Biobank participants followed for a median of 14.22 years, the study found that adherence to an ideal lifestyle was associated with a 14% lower risk of incident hearing impairment compared with a poor lifestyle. Mediation analyses showed metabolic biomarkers—particularly body mass index (BMI) and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-c)—accounted for the largest share of the association, while inflammatory pathways played a smaller secondary role. The findings offer mechanistic evidence supporting lifestyle-based interventions for hearing impairment prevention.

A research team has uncovered a possible epigenetic mechanism that enables the elite ‘Shuxinyou’ (SXY) cultivar of Aquilaria sinensis to produce agarwood more efficiently than ordinary ‘Baimu’ (BM).

Ionic skins (I-skins) integrated with high-performance electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding, self-powering functionality, and sensitive pressure detection are critically needed for soft electronics, yet remains a considerable challenge. Herein, we report a facile diffusion-complexation strategy for fabricating self-oriented gradient MXene/polyelectrolyte hydrogels, which function effectively as self-powered I-skins with outstanding EMI shielding and pressure-sensing capabilities. A pivotal feature of our method is the concurrent coupling of two processes: osmotic pressure gradient- induced in-plane self-orientation of MXene nanosheets and diffusion-complexation reaction-induced spontaneous formation of a longitudinal charge gradient. This charge gradient endows the I-skins with a pressure-sensitive self-polarized potential, while the in-plane aligned MXene network imparts both exceptional EMI shielding performance and high-pressure sensitivity. Consequently, the resulting I-skins exhibit a high EMI shielding effectiveness of 48 dB, along with outstanding self-powered sensing capability that delivers a high sensitivity (3.067 mV kPa⁻¹), a broad sensing range (0.05–80 kPa), a fast response time (120–130 ms), and a low detection limit for pressure (0.05 kPa). This work offers a new and scalable strategy for integrating high sensitivity, energy autonomy, and superior EMI shielding into advanced I-skins for broader applications.