Movement is a central aspect of almost every animal’s survival, whether it relates to local exploration or global migration. Even more sophisticated behaviors, such as the collective interactions for which many types of ants are famous, are built upon the motion of the individual. As such, understanding this individual behavior is integral to piecing together the life and ecology of an animal. By recording how individual ants explore a laboratory environment, researchers have come up with a model for how these ants navigate based on stochastic physics. As one of the most rigorous descriptions of ant exploration behavior to date, this model allows researchers to explore how these ants might behave in new environments, and highlights how physics-based tools and models can be used to quantify and understand living systems.

Neural activity unfolds through three-dimensional circuits in milliseconds or faster, but many optical microscopes still record volumes sequentially. A new PhotoniX Perspective from UCLA researchers reviews how light-field microscopy is being re-engineered for fast neuroimaging, from brain-wide calcium recordings to kilohertz-class volumetric voltage imaging. The authors argue that light-field microscopy should be judged not as a direct replacement for confocal, multiphoton, or light-sheet microscopy, but by information throughput, latency, photon efficiency, temporal accuracy, and robustness to motion at the speed frontier.

Researchers at the University of Ottawa and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light have successfully generated quantum-entangled photons directly from sunlight, matching the performance of traditional lasers after accounting for bandwidth differences. Published in Optica, this proof-of-concept demonstrates that abundant natural light can power quantum technologies, offering a pathway toward energy-efficient quantum computing and satellite-based secure communications.

Researchers at Kyushu University have developed a smart hydrogel film that changes color to signal food spoilage in real time. By immobilizing anthocyanins, a natural plant pigment, onto a metal-organic framework, the team stabilized the pigment against light and heat while preserving its pH sensitivity. Flexible, largely biodegradable, and able to seal its own surface cuts, the film offers a reliable, objective way to assess food quality and extend shelf life.

The search for leather alternatives has led researchers somewhere unexpected: fungi. Although traditional leather is durable, producing it requires animal agriculture, which carries negative environmental impacts. Meanwhile, vegan alternatives are typically made from petroleum-based plastics that are difficult to recycle. Researchers report in ACS Applied Bio Materials that mycelium, the underground network of fibers below mushroom caps, can be pressed into a durable yet compostable leather-like fabric. They even sewed the fabric into a purse. 

For the first time, scientists have observed a three-dimensional woven structure forming naturally inside a crystal, revealing a previously unknown way in which matter can organize itself.

Researchers at KAIST have developed a new holographic telepresence framework that captures and replays the physical light wavefront from a three-dimensional (3D) scene in real time. Unlike conventional 3D systems that reconstruct objects from depth maps, point clouds, or computer-generated models, the new approach directly measures optical wavefronts using a single camera image. This may help future communication systems reproduce depth, focus, and spatial presence more naturally.