Free-space optical communications (FSOC), which use lasers for high-speed data links between aircraft, spacecraft, and ground stations, are limited by size and power constraints. To overcome this, researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, proposed and experimentally validated a fiber-bundle-based architecture that could enable compact, multi-directional FSOC.

Researchers in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, have discovered that instead of manipulating every component or modifying interactions in a many-body system, occasionally resetting just a small fraction can reshape how the entire system behaves macroscopically, including how it transitions from one phase to another. This counterintuitive approach, called subsystem resetting, offers a powerful, universal control strategy to tune collective behavior in complex systems ranging from magnets to neural networks.

Radiative cooling fabric creates a thermally comfortable environment without energy input, providing a sustainable approach to personal thermal management. However, most currently reported fabrics mainly focus on outdoor cooling, ignoring to achieve simultaneous cooling both indoors and outdoors, thereby weakening the overall cooling performance. Herein, a full-scale structure fabric with selective emission properties is constructed for simultaneous indoor and outdoor cooling. The fabric achieves 94% reflectance performance in the sunlight band (0.3–2.5 µm) and 6% in the mid-infrared band (2.5–25 µm), effectively minimizing heat absorption and radiation release obstruction. It also demonstrates 81% radiative emission performance in the atmospheric window band (8–13 µm) and 25% radiative transmission performance in the mid-infrared band (2.5–25 μm), providing 60 and 26 W m⁻² net cooling power outdoors and indoors. In practical applications, the fabric achieves excellent indoor and outdoor human cooling, with temperatures 1.4–5.5 °C lower than typical polydimethylsiloxane film. This work proposes a novel design for the advanced radiative cooling fabric, offering significant potential to realize sustainable personal thermal management.

In a recent study, Medical University of South Carolina researchers compared two ways to help kids to get effective trauma therapy: training therapists vs. training therapists plus child protective services’ workers, juvenile justice professionals, school guidance counselors and others to spot struggling kids and refer them. Both approaches reduced kids’ posttraumatic stress and depression. The second method identified more kids who had experienced trauma and needed help and increased the number who finished treatment.

Recent research shows that using custom 3D-printed models tailored to each patient can help surgeons remove oral cancers more accurately.