Thermal superinsulation, arising from nanoporous aerogels with pore sizes < 70 nm, involves ultralow heat conduction with a thermal conductivity lower than that of stationary air (24 mW·m⁻¹·K⁻¹). Ultra-flexibility, on the basis of nanofibrous aerogels, demonstrates remarkable flexibility with a compressive strain of approximately 90%, fracture strain of approximately 10% and bending angel of approximately 100%. In Science Bulletin, researchers from Harbin Institute of Technology now fabricate a ceramic aerogel with a unitary core–sheath fiber architecture based on microstructural design, which achieves superior thermal insulation (21.96 mW·m⁻¹·K⁻¹) while retaining nanofiber flexibility (compressive strain of 80% and a bending angle of 100%).

Host neurocognitive function is influenced by the gut microbiome, but existing studies have primarily focused on changes in abundance at the genus or species level. The role of higher-resolution microbial genetic variations in shaping host neurobehavior remains unexplored. Now, Professor Lianmin Chen and colleagues from Nanjing Medical University and Jiangsu Provincial People's Hospital published their findings in Science China Life Sciences entitled "Gut microbial genetic variations are associated with exploratory behavior via SNV-driven metabolic regulation in a sheep model." The study systematically revealed that gut microbial genetic variations at the single-nucleotide resolution influence host cognitive exploratory behavior by regulating metabolites. The study further highlighted that microbial single nucleotide variations can affect host neural behavior by modulating related metabolites, which provides a theoretical basis for targeting gut microbiota to regulate neurometabolic diseases.

A research team from Peking University Yangtze Delta Institute of Optoelectronics has achieved the device-level implementation of a silica microsphere probe, demonstrating exceptional capabilities in high-sensitivity ultrasonic detection and ultrahigh-frequency vibrational spectroscopy. This advancement facilitates the transition of microsphere resonator technology from controlled laboratory environments to practical instrumentation, showing significant potential for applications in photoacoustic imaging, endoscopic sensing, and non-destructive evaluation.

Through the systematic optimization of metabolic network, engineered Escherichia coli efficiently synthesized inosinic acid using glucose, providing an industrial production route for a low-cost umami-enhancing substance.

Using genomic analysis, researchers discovered novel nitrogen-responsive promoters in Bacillus licheniformis, achieving the high-level secretory expression of glutamine transaminase in B. licheniformis for the first time.

Tilted metasurface nanostructures, with excellent physical properties and enormous application potential, pose an urgent need for manufacturing methods. Here, electric-field-driven generative-nanoimprinting technique is proposed. The electric field applied between the template and the substrate drives the contact, tilting, filling, and holding processes. By accurately controlling the introduced included angle between the flexible template and the substrate, tilted nanostructures with a controllable angle are imprinted onto the substrate, although they are vertical on the template. By flexibly adjusting the electric field intensity and the included angle, large-area uniform-tilted, gradient-tilted, and high-angle-tilted nanostructures are fabricated. In contrast to traditional replication, the morphology of the nanoimprinting structure is extended to customized control. This work provides a cost-effective, efficient, and versatile technology for the fabrication of various large-area tilted metasurface structures. As an illustration, a tilted nanograting with a high coupling efficiency is fabricated and integrated into augmented reality displays, demonstrating superior imaging quality.

Recent years have witnessed transformative changes brought about by artificial intelligence (AI) techniques with billions of parameters for the realization of high accuracy, proposing high demand for the advanced and AI chip to solve these AI tasks efficiently and powerfully. Rapid progress has been made in the field of advanced chips recently, such as the development of photonic computing, the advancement of the quantum processors, the boost of the biomimetic chips, and so on. Designs tactics of the advanced chips can be conducted with elaborated consideration of materials, algorithms, models, architectures, and so on. Though a few reviews present the development of the chips from their unique aspects, reviews in the view of the latest design for advanced and AI chips are few. Here, the newest development is systematically reviewed in the field of advanced chips. First, background and mechanisms are summarized, and subsequently most important considerations for co-design of the software and hardware are illustrated. Next, strategies are summed up to obtain advanced and AI chips with high excellent performance by taking the important information processing steps into consideration, after which the design thought for the advanced chips in the future is proposed. Finally, some perspectives are put forward.

Recently, the iGaN Laboratory led by Professor Haiding Sun at the School of Microelectronics, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), together with a global collaborative team from Wuhan University, Zhejiang University and University of Cambridge, has successfully developed the first miniaturized ultraviolet (UV) spectrometer and realized on-chip spectral imaging. Based on a novel gallium nitride (GaN) cascaded photodiode architecture and integrated with deep neural network (DNN) algorithms, the device achieves high-precision spectral detection and high-resolution multispectral imaging. With a response speed on the nanosecond scale, it sets a new world record for the fastest reported miniaturized spectrometer. The work was published online in Nature Photonics on September 26, 2025.