India is the most populated country in the world and regularly experiences extreme heatwaves in the spring and summer. A recent study suggests that both natural and man-made aerosols in the atmosphere, combined with cloud cover, have mitigated the surface warming of the area compared to other landmasses.

With the accelerated advancement of lunar and Mars exploration programs, long-term human habitation on extraterrestrial bodies faces the severe challenge of extreme diurnal temperature variations. Phase change materials (PCMs), owing to their ability to store or release substantial latent heat during solid–liquid phase transitions while maintaining a nearly constant temperature, have become an ideal solution for space thermal control systems. However, in the microgravity environment of space, the ground-dominant natural convection tends to disappear, and thermocapillary convection may become the prevailing heat transfer mechanism; in low-gravity environments such as those on the Moon and Mars, the coexistence and competition between these two convective regimes remain unclear. Existing studies have predominantly focused on either Earth's gravity or pure microgravity conditions, with a notable scarcity of research on the coupled effects of thermocapillary and natural convection at intermediate gravity levels. The melting dynamics of two typical organic PCMs, succinonitrile and n-octadecane, under low-gravity conditions have not yet been systematically elucidated. Therefore, clarifying the roles of thermocapillary convection under varying gravity levels and container geometries holds significant engineering guidance for the design of efficient space thermal control systems.

A review, published on September 11 in Cyborg and Bionic Systems by researchers at Tianjin University, summarizes recent advances in intracortical microstimulation (ICMS), a technique that uses tiny electrodes implanted in the brain to activate specific groups of neurons. The researchers discuss how ICMS has evolved from a tool for mapping brain function into a potential technology for sensory feedback, information delivery, closed-loop neuromodulation and biointegrated neural interfaces.

Brain–computer interfaces are increasingly being explored as a way to restore lost functions or provide new channels for communication between the nervous system and electronic devices. While much BCI research focuses on reading neural signals, ICMS provides the complementary ability to write information back into the brain.

“ICMS has emerged as a prominent invasive modality capable of activating intracortical neuronal populations with high precision,” the researchers write. The technology can potentially replace or supplement natural sensory inputs, probe

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM), with its excellent optical sectioning capability and deep tissue penetration, has become an important tool for neuroscience and biomedical imaging. However, efficient axial information acquisition remains a major challenge for high-speed volumetric imaging of dynamic biological processes. Recent advances in optical devices, light-field control, information encoding, and intelligent computing have expanded the approaches to axial imaging, ranging from single-point scanning and multifocal parallel imaging to continuous-beam coverage. This review summarizes these developments from the perspective of axial information acquisition, and further discusses light-field control for improving 3D imaging performance, providing an overview of the field and its future directions toward faster, deeper, and higher-quality volumetric MPM. Meanwhile, the focal control, temporal encoding, structured light fields, and computational reconstruction methods discussed in this review are highly transferable and can be extended to other laser-scanning microscopy modalities, such as coherent Raman and photoacoustic microscopy.