The facilities of the Institute of Ceramic Technology (ITC) hosted a meeting to formally establish the Technical Committee of the Joint GEA Environmental Engineering Research Laboratory. The committee is composed of the Vice-Rector for Innovation, Knowledge Transfer and Science Outreach, David Cabedo; the Director General of AICE, Yolanda Reig; the scientific and technical coordinator on behalf of the UJI, Eliseo Monfort; and the scientific and technical coordinator on behalf of AICE, Irina Celades.

In October 2025, the Universitat Jaume I and the Association for the Research of Ceramic Industries (AICE) signed an addendum to their existing collaboration agreement to create the joint research laboratory GEA – Environmental Engineering Group. Its main aim is to promote joint research and innovation activities within the laboratory’s areas of work, fostering knowledge transfer and exchange in environmental engineering.

A new method developed with the participation of ICTER researchers shows that, in retinal imaging, less can mean more - fewer settings, fewer complications, and more information.

The more precisely we want to examine the human retina, the more clearly one of the fundamental limits of physics becomes apparent. In cellular-resolution eye imaging, the same trade-off has applied for years - tiny structures can be seen with impressive sharpness, but only within a very thin layer of tissue. To view the entire retina, researchers usually have to refocus and acquire several separate scans in a repetitive manner. An international team led by Dawid Borycki and Maciej Wojtkowski from ICTER, together with Zhuolin Liu and Daniel X. Hammer from the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health (CDRH), has now shown that this limitation can be overcome.

Rather than making the hardware even more complex, the researchers combined optical and computational procedures. This is an important step not only for advancing imaging physics, but also for improving the diagnosis of eye diseases and neurological disorders. The details are described in the article, “Computational aberration correction enables full-thickness retinal imaging with adaptive optics optical coherence tomography,” published in Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering.

Chemokines, acting as "traffic controllers" in the tumor microenvironment, regulate immune cell infiltration and local immunity. This review summarizes the chemokine expression profiles in tumors, their diverse roles in pro- and anti-tumor immunity, current targeting strategies (inhibition, delivery, engineering), and synergistic potential ability with other immunotherapies. Despite challenges, targeting the chemokine receptor axis holds great promise for reprogramming the tumor microenvironment and advancing precision cancer therapy.

Distributed fiber-optic sensors are widely used to monitor temperature and strain in infrastructure, but their spatial resolution has long been limited. In a new study, researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology and Yokohama National University, Japan, have demonstrated that operating near a previously avoided frequency regime and suppressing signal distortions allows reflection-based sensing to achieve a world-record spatial resolution of 6 mm among single-end-access configurations. This enables precise monitoring of temperature and strain in infrastructure

For many years, designing synthetic polymer systems has been inspired by the hierarchical self-assembly of folded proteins into functional nanostructures. However, extending folding-based design principles to small synthetic molecules has remained elusive. In particular, luminescent molecules with complex three-dimensional structures were considered difficult to assemble. Now, researchers from Japan demonstrate that such molecules can undergo folding-mediated self-assembly to form highly ordered nanotubes. These structures exhibit unique multidirectional energy transport, highlighting their potential for advanced optoelectronic applications.

Cutinases are fungal enzymes that naturally degrade plant cuticles and show promise for recycling plastics. However, they must balance structural rigidity to withstand high temperatures with flexibility required for catalysis. Now, researchers have investigated the structural basis of catalytic activation in a heat-tolerant cutinase, CtCut, from the fungus Chaetomium thermophilum and found that a rigid core supports stability while a flexible lid is associated with catalytic function, offering insights for improving enzymes for plastic recycling.

A research team at IDM is leading the development of a sensor that paves the way for the rapid, selective and cost-effective detection of active tuberculosis. The device detects the presence of a protein secreted by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes the disease. It provides results in just 60 minutes – significantly less time than conventional methods, such as microbiological culture, which can take several weeks.

Researchers have developed a universal strategy to create high-voltage aqueous electrolytes by incorporating ionic liquids, overcoming the solubility limits of conventional zinc salts. The new “water-in-salt/ionic liquid” (Wi(S/IL)) approach enables an exceptionally wide 3.8 V electrochemical window and stable zinc cycling over 10,000 cycles. The work also establishes a multi-spectroscopic framework for decoding electrolyte liquid structures, paving the way for rational design of next-generation safe and high-energy batteries.