A new review in eGastroenterology defines metabolic dysfunction and alcohol-associated liver disease (MetALD) as a distinct clinical entity within the framework of steatotic liver disease. The authors outline diagnostic thresholds, clinical management strategies and emerging mechanistic insights, highlighting synergistic injury from metabolic risk factors and moderate alcohol intake. They emphasise gut-liver and adipose-liver crosstalk, immune activation and genetic susceptibility, while calling for refined biomarkers, validated alcohol assessment tools and translational models to guide personalised care.

In the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, researchers addressed the challenge of balancing physical resolution and sensing distance in flexible capacitive dual-mode proximity-tactile sensor, a design inspired by the pupillary near reflex of the human eye.

Inflammation of bones is a characteristic of disorders like apical periodontitis. Researchers have found that copper-mediated cell death is an important factor. Copper overload suppresses the production of glycogen and reducing agents, increasing oxidative stress and inducing pro-inflammatory activity in macrophages. Suppressing copper overload and restoring glycogen synthesis are potential therapeutic pathways against inflammatory bone diseases.

For the first time, we have created a thin, flexible “metasurface”—a thin metasurface with a custom pattern that can alter the behavior of microwaves. In a flat configuration, the metasurface generates neat circular polarization textures. But when the researchers bent the sheet into conformal shapes, the patterns stretched and deformed accordingly. Despite these changes, the key topological number of the pattern stayed the same. That’s the hallmark of topological protection: the essential property doesn’t change even when the shape does.

Distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing is an emerging technology that has been used for geophysical exploration, earthquake monitoring and structural health monitoring, etc., with continuous monitoring capability over long fiber spans. However, the technology still suffers from the trade-off between measurement speed and dynamic strain measurement range. Recently, researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) and Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Chile) have developed a frequency-comb spectrum-correlation reflectometry based distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing technique, which achieves an order-of-magnitude improvement in frequency response over the state-of-the-art fast frequency scanning methods, meanwhile it achieves more than tenfold enhancement in dynamic strain measurement range in comparison with the existing phase-demodulated systems. This breakthrough represents a new paradigm for distributed fiber-optic sensing and will meet the urgent demands across a wide range of industrial fields.

A research team from multiple institutions including the Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering (CAS), Beijing Computational Science Research Center, and Hangzhou Dianzi University has developed a new strategy to design metallic glasses (MGs) that are both kinetically ultra stable and mechanically ductile. The study shows that by engineering specific spatial patterns of oxygen atoms within a zirconium-copper metallic glass, the material can resist structural change at high temperatures (kinetic stability) while retaining the ability to deform plastically without turning brittle. This discovery effectively decouples two properties that were previously thought to be inextricably linked, opening new avenues for creating high-performance amorphous materials.

Photonics is gaining momentum as a platform for high-speed AI computing. Researchers in Singapore have demonstrated a passive, ultrafast, and integration-ready all-optical nonlinear activation function using thin-film lithium-niobate nanowaveguides. By achieving highly efficient second-harmonic generation within the data path, the activation arises from a near-instantaneous electronic response. The advance tackles a major obstacle to fully optical neural computation, opening a path to on-chip photonic neural networks that harness the intrinsic speed and bandwidth of light.