Researchers have developed a real-time vehicle-tracking framework that can follow traffic across large roadside sensor networks with low latency and meter-level accuracy, a step that could help support safer and more responsive vehicle-road-cloud integration systems.

Researchers have developed a comprehensive numerical model for liquid metal batteries that captures potential, mass transfer, and species distribution while remaining fast enough to support practical battery management. The work could help bring greater precision to how these emerging batteries are monitored, controlled, and optimized, especially in long-duration energy storage applications where both safety and lifespan are critical.

A groundbreaking multidisciplinary study reveals that the abundant mangrove fern Acrostichum aureum in Hainan Island harbors moderate genetic diversity but faces hidden vulnerability, providing critical evidence for targeted mangrove ecosystem conservation strategies.

A new review in the Journal of Pancreatology explores TIGIT as a pivotal immune checkpoint for cancer immunotherapy. It details TIGIT’s immunosuppressive mechanisms, its correlation with poor prognosis, and the superior efficacy of anti-TIGIT/PD-1 combination therapy in overcoming resistance to conventional immune checkpoint inhibitors.

How do waves spread, stall, or pile up in materials that are both messy and “open”—leaking energy to their surroundings? Researchers at the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences have derived a compact mathematical rule, the universal Thouless relations (UTRs), that links two seemingly separate things: how densely energy levels populate the spectrum, and how strongly waves grow or decay across the system. The relations work for a broad family of one-dimensional disordered, non-Hermitian models, predict the boundary between two kinds of wave trapping without heavy computation, and uncover a new type of “half-localized, half-fractal” critical state with no counterpart in ordinary closed systems.

Reservoirs around the world are losing storage capacity at an average rate of 7.3 percent per decade—disproportionately affecting small reservoirs, which together provide water to billions of people. The data come from a study published in Nature Sustainability on June 5, which offers the clearest global assessment of reservoir sedimentation to date.

Researchers developed MARVAL, an automated platform for measuring the shape of brain blood vessels from time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography. In more than 3,000 community participants and nearly 9,000 stroke patients with high-quality imaging, the team built an East Asian cerebrovascular template, charted age-related vascular changes, and found that small-vessel integrity and network complexity were strongly associated with disability, recurrence and mortality after ischemic stroke.

 

 Fatty streaks, one of the earliest signs of atherosclerosis, comprise lipid-laden foam cells, which are traditionally thought to be derived from circulating monocytes that have infiltrated through the leaky endothelium and from vascular smooth muscle cells that have migrated into the intima from the media. Here we demonstrate that fatty streaks can also be induced by stacked human aortic endothelial cells (HAECs). Scanning electron microscopy revealed that these stacked HAECs form a new cellular phenotype presenting a streak/coral-like structure: “coralthelial cells”. These coralthelial cells exhibit considerable lipid accumulation and increased expression of Golgi and coat protein II markers in their nuclei. Moreover, proinflammatory mediators, including interleukin-6, monocyte chemoattractant protein-1, and C-X-C motif chemokine ligand 8, are upregulated in the coralthelial cell, potentially due to the nuclear translocation of the Golgi apparatus and an elevated expression of the ribosomal protein RPL23 in the nucleolus. To our knowledge, we demonstrate for the first time that fatty streak–like structures found in atherosclerotic plaques can also be generated from the stacked HAECs.

Over the last few decades, physical principles have been proposed to explain some biological processes and functions. However, biological principles remain elusive. A biological principle is a governing rule that guides the structure and functions of cells. Biological principles are built upon the laws of physics and chemistry, but they go beyond these laws and are unique to living matter. Here, we discuss what differentiates a biological principle from a physical principle and discuss candidates for biological principles. We review evidence from literature that regulation of cytoskeletal prestress (endogenous cytoskeletal pre-existing tensile stress) is essential for governing biological structures and functions of living cells. We propose that, in addition to the biological principles of Central Dogma and metabolism, cytoskeletal prestress homeostasis is a biological principle of a living cell across all domains of life. We propose that living cells regulate their stress and modulus to limit maximum strain on the cells. Homeostasis of endogenous energy-dependent, stress-supported systems that use cytoskeletal (CSK) prestress (the force of life) to stabilize structure represents a biological principle of a living cell that is not observed in inorganic systems, whereas other basic principles (e.g., self-assembly) are required for living systems but are also found in simpler nonliving systems. Leveraging biological principles of cells may have far-reaching implications in understanding the essence of cell life and designing effective interventions for therapeutics to advance medicine and enhance human health.