A new international study, published in Science Advances, fully accounts for what is driving the world's rising oceans over six decades.

NIMS discovered a phenomenon in which droplets on a single solid surface exhibit both "sticky" and "repellent” state simultaneously; namely, the wetting behavior branches into two states. This is a discovery that overturns interface chemistry scientists' belief held for over 200 years that, on a non-textured surface, wetting state is uniquely determined by solid/liquid combinations. Furthermore, the research team also clarified a universal surface design principle that causes this phenomenon. This research result was published in Advanced Materials Interfaces on April 2, 2026.

Achieving in situ dynamic tracking of neurotransmitters in the complex intestinal lumen remains a major technical challenge in gastroenterology and biosensing. The research team developed a general sensing architecture that integrates a one-dimensional nanoconductive network with supramolecular host-guest recognition, and on this basis constructed a stretchable electrochemical sensing platform. This platform offers a systematic solution to three key obstacles in the in situ detection of small molecules in the gut lumen: adaptation to mechanical deformation, suppression of biofouling, and selective recognition of structurally similar molecules. Using this framework, the team revealed for the first time the central role of enterochromaffin cells (ECs) in immune-mechanical signal integration by electrochemical strategy. Under stimulation by microbial mimetics and their metabolites, ECs integrate multiple external signals and reset their response threshold through dual regulation: enhancing neurotransmitter synthesis and storage while increasing sensitivity to mechanical stimulation.

The significance of this study lies not only in validating sensing performance in the intestinal setting, but also in proposing a practical strategy to address a long-standing and widely shared challenge in in vivo electrochemical monitoring. More importantly, by emphasizing the coordinated design of sensing material structure and function, this work moves beyond optimizing a single performance metric in stretchable devices and instead establishes a systematic framework for accurate chemical information acquisition in complex mechanical and biochemical environments. Although the intestinal lumen serves here as a particularly challenging validation scenario, the underlying design principles are expected to be applicable to other in vivo monitoring systems.

Researchers have achieved the first real-space imaging of altermagnetic domains in RuO₂ using a novel thermal imaging technique. By combining lock-in thermography with the spin-dependent Peltier effect, the team visualized micrometer-scale magnetic domains and demonstrated controlled domain manipulation through magnetic field cooling. This breakthrough provides robust experimental evidence for altermagnetism in RuO₂ and establishes a new approach for characterizing this emerging class of magnetic materials, with significant implications for future spintronic devices.

A new approach to accurately imaging objects with complex shapes and varying degrees of "shininess" could enable high-precision applications in virtual and mixed reality settings, industrial inspection and medical imaging.