Wood coloring is an important approach to expanding the decorative possibilities of wood products, but achieving a colored appearance without concealing the natural grain and texture remains a materials challenge. Transparent coloring seeks to reconcile these objectives by combining color modification with the visual preservation of the wood substrate. This review, published in the Journal of Bioresources and Bioproducts, focuses on transparent coloring of wood, a topic relevant to the design of wood products for interior decoration, furniture and other applications in which natural appearance is an important consideration. The subject also raises broader questions about color uniformity, compatibility with the wood structure, color stability and the durability of treated materials. Understanding the available approaches and their limitations is important for advancing wood-coloring technologies and identifying opportunities for further research.

Every online order sets off a complex chain of operational decisions, from choosing where items are fulfilled to picking, shipping and returns. A new review of 198 studies maps these decisions across the end-to-end B2C fulfillment process and shows how research is moving toward integrated, real-time and data- and AI-enabled decision-making, offering a roadmap for more efficient and responsive e-commerce operations.

The tumor-confined nano-activator (iCLAN_TSP-SAg) can drive localized expression of bacterial superantigens within tumors, enabling potent, antigen-independent T-cell activation while avoiding systemic toxicity.

Scientists have developed a simple yet powerful strategy to overcome a long-standing challenge in cancer phototheranostics—the trade-off between imaging brightness, therapeutic efficacy, and biological stability. By systematically replacing hydrogen atoms with deuterium (a heavier isotope) in a near-infrared fluorescent molecule, researchers achieved simultaneous improvements in all three critical properties. The optimized nanoparticles delivered 26% higher fluorescence brightness, 14% more reactive oxygen species for killing cancer cells, and 20% better stability in blood. In mouse models, a single treatment completely eliminated breast tumors, and fluorescence-guided surgery enabled precise removal of colorectal cancer remnants that were invisible under white light—extending survival from under 20 days to over 60 days. The strategy is broadly applicable and does not require redesigning the molecular backbone, offering a versatile platform for next-generation cancer theranostics.

In the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Prof. Jinyou Shao at Xi'an Jiaotong University and his co-workers have resolved the challenge of maintaining electrical reliability under repeated bending by bonding a sturdy copper base directly beneath a reservoir of liquid metal alloy. The pairing functions like an autonomous, self-repairing highway: as bending tears microscopic cracks into the solid copper floor, the liquid alloy overhead immediately flows into the fractures to preserve electrical flow, while the rigid copper foundation bears external pressure so the circuit never chokes under compression.

In the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Prof. Yang Li at Zhejiang University and his co-workers developed a dual-sided stencil printing technique that packs high-capacity energy storage into electrode tracks just 80 μm wide by giving a tungsten stencil two distinct physical personalities—a dual-sided "Janus mask" named after the two-faced Roman god.

Cardiovascular medicine is inherently multimodal, but the data available at the clinical decision point are rarely as complete or as synchronized as benchmark evaluations assume. Recent reviews identify incomplete datasets, heterogeneous data characteristics, and missing modalities as persistent barriers to multimodal clinical AI. A correspondence published in Medicine Discovery argues that the central problem is not how to fuse more data, but how to reason when clinically relevant data are incomplete, temporally misaligned, or no longer representative of the patient's current state. The authors distinguish five linked but non-equivalent problems — conventional multimodal fusion, robustness to missing modalities, temporally aware modeling, uncertainty-aware selective prediction, and clinically informed interpretation of why a modality is unavailable — and treat modality availability as an observation state rather than a data defect. They define deferral operationally, separate it from calibration, uncertainty estimation, and distribution-shift detection, propose hybrid deferral rules that combine non-compensatory clinical hard stops with graded model-derived signals, and set out five candidate conditions for an intended-use-specific minimum evaluation suite. The framework is offered as a complement to existing clinical AI guidance (TRIPOD+AI, PROBAST+AI, FUTURE-AI, DECIDE-AI, CONSORT-AI, SPIRIT-AI) rather than a replacement, and as a conceptual proposal requiring prospective evaluation and multi-stakeholder consensus.