Cable tray systems are essential for supporting electrical and communication cables in buildings, but their failure during earthquakes can disrupt critical services and pose serious safety risks. Researchers have now validated Japan's seismic design guidelines through full-scale shaking table tests. While seismic supports proved sufficiently strong, the cable trays themselves were more vulnerable. The team also developed a simple steel-wire reinforcement method that significantly improves seismic performance in both new and existing buildings.

Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) are fundamental building blocks for flexible electronics, including flexible displays, wearable sensors and electronic skin. However, at the heterointerface between the organic semiconductor (OSC) and the dielectric layer where charge transport takes place, structural and energetic disorders inevitably introduce defects, which adversely affect device stability. To address these challenges, researchers from Tianjin University and collaborating institutions have developed a novel interfacial engineering strategy, in which ultrathin alkyl chains of alkylated OSC molecules are covalently attached to the OSC backbone. This approach effectively reduces the trap density at the OSC/dielectric interface, thereby enabling stable OFET operation. In addition, this strategy substantially decreases the dielectric layer thickness, which facilitates low‑voltage operation. As a result, OFETs constructed on the basis of this strategy operate stably at a low voltage of −1 V for over 10,000 s, while integrated logic circuits achieve high gain, fast switching and robust stability. This work provides a new pathway toward high-reliability flexible electronics.

As solid-state electrolyte research grows, so does the amount of data. The problem is that much of it remains scattered across the literature. That is where researchers at WPI-AIMR, Tohoku University, come in — with DigBat, a new platform designed to bring this information together and help map the growing landscape of solid-state electrolyte research. By connecting data from across the field, DigBat can help researchers see relationships more clearly and point toward promising directions for future battery materials research.

Replacing petroleum-based synthetic fibers with sustainable bio-derived materials is critical to curbing global microplastic pollution, but biomass fibers have long been limited by insufficient mechanical performance. Researchers from Anhui Agricultural University and Zhejiang University developed high-performance cellulose metafibers (Meta-CFs) using a scalable hydrodynamic twisting strategy. By guiding continuously twisted structures on chemically cross-linked cellulose networks via an asymmetric microfluidic field, the team achieved a record tensile strength of 3.29 GPa and a toughness of 349.5 MJ m^–3—rivaling both high-performance synthetic fibers and natural spider silk. The fibers can be scaled into bundles while retaining GPa-level strength, are fully biodegradable, and have been validated as durable trimmer lines that eliminate persistent agricultural microplastic residues.

Extended reality (XR) aims for "immersion," requiring displays to simultaneously deliver a wide field of view (FOV) and true 3D imagery free of vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). Researchers in China have reported a near-eye light-field display architecture based on a heterogeneous metalens array. By integrating lens and spatially heterogeneous prism phase designs with nanoimprint technology, the array overcomes the aberration-induced FOV limit of conventional microlens arrays, providing a hardware path for next-generation immersive XR displays.

A five-university Japan-Taiwan research consortium - led by Principal Researchers Yoshitane Imai (Professor, Kindai University) and Ming-Chia Li (Associate Professor, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University) - has been selected for the 2026 Japan–Taiwan Exchange Association Joint Research Grant Program in Natural and Applied Sciences. The participating institutions include Kindai University, Ibaraki University, Osaka Metropolitan University, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, and National Central University.

Through this international collaboration, Japanese and Taiwanese researchers are developing core technologies for circularly polarized organic light-emitting diodes (CP-OLEDs), a type of next-generation semiconductor optical device that natively emits circularly polarized light.

To launch the project, the "2026 Taiwan–Japan Joint Symposium on Next-Generation Circularly Polarized Luminescence Technology" will be held on September 1–2, 2026, at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University and National Central University in Taiwan. A delegation of researchers and students from Kindai University, Ibaraki University, and Osaka Metropolitan University will travel to Taiwan to present their latest scientific findings. The two-day program features dedicated sessions for early-career researchers, laboratory tours, and strategic planning meetings to align research objectives for the upcoming three-year initiative.

The University of Tennessee is part of a consortium led by the University of California, Berkeley that was awarded a five-year, $25 million grant by the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration in December 2025.