Engineers and scientists, as well as artists, have long been inspired by the beauty and functionality of nature’s designs. Japan designed high-speed trains to cut through the air as smoothly as the kingfisher cuts through water, for example, but useful designs can also be found at a microscopic level. The study of biology in combination with materials science is called biomateriomics. An Italian research team sees great potential in the application of generative artificial intelligence to this already interdisciplinary field. They have described this potential, and the associated limitations and challenges, in an open access review article titled “Generative Artificial Intelligence for Advancing Discovery and Design in Biomateriomics,” published May 1 in Intelligent Computing, a Science Partner Journal.

Ben Jones, associate professor of physics at The University of Texas at Arlington, has been named to the 2025 cohort of Experimental Physics Investigators, a distinguished group of mid-career researchers pushing the boundaries of experimental physics.

The dairy industry has been plagued by a persistent global problem for decades – bacterial infection of cow udders that significantly reduces milk production. Antibiotics have been used to treat the infection, called bovine mastitis, but there is rising antibiotic resistance and concerns around milk contamination from antibiotic residues. Now, a team of international researchers has developed alternatives to antibiotics that prevent infection through a novel mechanism they discovered. These alternatives have attracted interest from several agricultural companies in Australia, Belgium, Malaysia and New Zealand seeking substitutes that are safer and more environmentally friendly than existing compounds in preventing bovine mastitis. The scientists were led by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), in collaboration with the Antimicrobial Resistance Interdisciplinary Research Group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) research enterprise in Singapore.

Light bulbs come in many shapes and styles: globes, twists, flame-like candle tips and long tubes. But there aren’t many thin options. Now, researchers report in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces that they have created a paper-thin LED that gives off a warm, sun-like glow. The LEDs could light up the next generation of phone and computer screens and other light sources while helping users avoid disruptions to their sleep patterns.

Ferroic materials such as ferromagnets and -electrics underpin modern data storage, yet face limits: they switch slowly, or suffer from unstable polarization due to depolarizing fields respectively. A new class, ferroaxials, avoids these issues by hosting vortices of dipoles with clockwise or anticlockwise textures, but are hard to control. Researchers at the Max-Planck-Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter (MPSD) and the University of Oxford now show that bi-stable ferroaxial states can be switched with single flashes of polarized terahertz light. This enables ultrafast, light-controlled and stable switching, a platform for next-generation non-volatile data storage.

Levitation has long been pursued by stage magicians and physicists alike. For audiences, the sight of objects floating midair is wondrous. For scientists, it’s a powerful way of isolating objects from external disturbances. This is particularly useful in case of rotors, as their torque and angular momentum, used to measure gravity, gas pressure, momentum, among other phenomena in both classical and quantum physics, can be strongly influenced by friction. Freely suspending the rotor could drastically reduce these disturbances – and now, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have designed, created, and analyzed such a macroscopic device, bringing the magic of near-frictionless levitation down to earth through precision engineering. 

Researchers have created a polymer “Chinese lantern” that can snap into more than a dozen curved, three-dimensional shapes by compressing or twisting the original structure. This rapid shape-shifting behavior can be controlled remotely using a magnetic field, allowing the structure to be used for a variety of applications.