Asymmetric bending is a promising way to achieve rapid and efficient crawling in soft robots. In a recent innovation, researchers from Chung-Ang University have demonstrated a soft robot that employs liquid crystal elastomers with paper-based electrodes to produce asymmetric bending. This soft robot mimics a caterpillar and demonstrates efficient crawling via regulated asymmetric heating. This technology offers a facile and scalable strategy for advancing next-generation soft robotic systems and their applications.

Until now, the early phase of drug discovery for the development of new therapeutics has been both cost- and time-intensive. Researchers at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) have now developed a platform on which extremely miniaturized nanodroplets with a volume of only 200 nanoliters per droplet – comparable to a grain of sand – and containing only 300 cells per test can be arranged. This platform enables the researchers to synthesize, characterize, and test thousands of therapeutic agents on the same chip, saving time and resources. The researchers report on their findings in the journal “Angewandte Chemie” (DOI: 10.1002/anie.202507586)

Researchers leveraged high-throughput computing and machine learning to systematically evaluate a large family of magnesium-based thermoelectric materials. The study pinpoints thermal expansion as a key knob: it strengthens lattice anharmonicity to reduce lattice thermal conductivity and narrows band dispersion to enhance the Seebeck coefficient, together lifting the figure of merit (ZT). Building on these insights, the team delivers a robust XGBoost predictor that accelerates the screening and optimization of Mg-based thermoelectrics.