Work led by chemists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is showing that there is a different way to think about designing reactions. Their fundamentally novel strategy, published recently in Nature, fixes a long-standing limitation in electron-transfer selectivity, could open up many otherwise inaccessible and potentially valuable coupling reactions. 

Harvard engineers used standard industrial weft knitting to create dense fabrics that snap between multiple stable 3D shapes, turning ordinary textiles into mechanical metamaterials. 

The low endosomal escape efficiency of endocytosis-based delivery has become a key barrier restricting therapeutic biomacromolecule applications in biomedicine. A review published in Biomedical Analysis highlights emerging non-endocytic transmembrane delivery strategies that bypass conventional cellular uptake pathways and enable direct cytosolic delivery of proteins, nucleic acids, and gene-editing tools. Led by Dr. Yang Liu from Hefei Comprehensive National Science Center, the review summarizes recent advances in physical, biomimetic, and bioengineered delivery platforms and discusses their potential for gene therapy, drug delivery, and cellular engineering.

Real-time intelligent systems need processors that adapt as data change. Scientists from the University of Cambridge, Tsinghua University and collaborators developed a temporally plastic photonic processor (TPPP) that combines stable optical computation, fast dynamic modulation and recursive optical memory. The chip improves robustness in spectral sensing and autonomous-driving control, and projects up to 16 times higher energy efficiency and 100 times lower intrinsic compute delay than advanced electronic processors.