With the accelerated advancement of lunar and Mars exploration programs, long-term human habitation on extraterrestrial bodies faces the severe challenge of extreme diurnal temperature variations. Phase change materials (PCMs), owing to their ability to store or release substantial latent heat during solid–liquid phase transitions while maintaining a nearly constant temperature, have become an ideal solution for space thermal control systems. However, in the microgravity environment of space, the ground-dominant natural convection tends to disappear, and thermocapillary convection may become the prevailing heat transfer mechanism; in low-gravity environments such as those on the Moon and Mars, the coexistence and competition between these two convective regimes remain unclear. Existing studies have predominantly focused on either Earth's gravity or pure microgravity conditions, with a notable scarcity of research on the coupled effects of thermocapillary and natural convection at intermediate gravity levels. The melting dynamics of two typical organic PCMs, succinonitrile and n-octadecane, under low-gravity conditions have not yet been systematically elucidated. Therefore, clarifying the roles of thermocapillary convection under varying gravity levels and container geometries holds significant engineering guidance for the design of efficient space thermal control systems.

A research team has uncovered a more complex history for the common fig, showing that its domestication was not driven by a single origin in the Levant followed by a simple westward spread. 

Accurate color matching is essential for achieving aesthetically realistic outcomes in dental crown and bridge restorations. Traditional visual methods, however, are often affected by lighting variations and observer subjectivity, which can result in inconsistent color matching, including metameric mismatches under changing illumination. Hyperspectral imaging can provide the spectral reflectance of teeth, but existing spatial-scanning or filter-based systems are typically bulky and time-consuming, limiting their suitability for real-time clinical use. Snapshot hyperspectral imaging captures multispectral information in a single exposure, yet many existing reconstruction algorithms rely primarily on data-driven approaches without explicitly accounting for the underlying physics of image formation, limiting their generalizability and interpretability.

Multiphoton microscopy (MPM), with its excellent optical sectioning capability and deep tissue penetration, has become an important tool for neuroscience and biomedical imaging. However, efficient axial information acquisition remains a major challenge for high-speed volumetric imaging of dynamic biological processes. Recent advances in optical devices, light-field control, information encoding, and intelligent computing have expanded the approaches to axial imaging, ranging from single-point scanning and multifocal parallel imaging to continuous-beam coverage. This review summarizes these developments from the perspective of axial information acquisition, and further discusses light-field control for improving 3D imaging performance, providing an overview of the field and its future directions toward faster, deeper, and higher-quality volumetric MPM. Meanwhile, the focal control, temporal encoding, structured light fields, and computational reconstruction methods discussed in this review are highly transferable and can be extended to other laser-scanning microscopy modalities, such as coherent Raman and photoacoustic microscopy.

An Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team investigated the prevalence and characteristics of mcr-positive Enterobacteriaceae in retail meat in Thailand following the national ban on prophylactic colistin use in food producing animals.

A team led by the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, including researchers at Argonne National Laboratory, has reported the first experimental investigation of a nuclear physics reaction essential to explain how the element strontium is formed in stars. The study, published Communications Physics, reports that the team used indirect experimental techniques to extract previously inaccessible information about how an isotope of a separate element — krypton — absorbs, or captures, neutrons.