Focusing on the engineering challenge of achieving stable, high-strength welding between rough metals surfaces and transparent materials, this work provides an in-depth elucidation of the femtosecond laser welding mechanism for dissimilar materials under non-optical-contact conditions. Through high-speed in situ imaging techniques, it reveals the dynamic coupling between linear absorption in the metal and nonlinear absorption in sapphire during ultrafast laser irradiation. The study further identifies an active interfacial gap filling effect of molten metal, which proactively regulates the free space region at the interface. It clarifies that the welding strength is primarily limited by cracks induced by thermal stress in sapphire, and demonstrates welding performance exceeding 10 MPa between rough Invar alloy and sapphire. These findings offer theoretical guidance and technical support for high-strength, highly stable welding of dissimilar materials.

Dr Gabriela Ligeza is a former PhD student from the University of Basel and now a postdoctoral researcher at the European Space Agency (ESA). With her colleagues, she recently tested a new strategy for semi-autonomous exploration of planets with a legged robot equipped with state-of-the-art measurement tools. The new system was designed to rapidly investigate multiple targets and collect mineralogical data.

The results, published in Frontiers in Space Technologies, showed that semi-autonomous robots can quickly investigate several targets, identify promising rocks, and return scientifically valuable data for astrobiology and in-situ resource utilization (‘living off the land’).

In this guest editorial, Ligeza explains their findings for a wider audience.

Researchers have demonstrated a compact optical wireless transmitter that delivers very high data rates while consuming significantly less energy than conventional WiFi systems. The chip-scale platform integrates a 5 × 5 array of tiny semiconductor lasers with custom beam-shaping optics, enabling parallel data transmission and controlled light distribution for multiuser indoor environments. In experiments, the system achieved an aggregate data rate of more than 360 gigabits per second over a two-meter free-space link, with energy consumption per bit roughly half that of state-of-the-art WiFi. The results highlight the potential of optical wireless communication as an energy-efficient complement to radio-based networks for future high-capacity indoor connectivity.

Understanding how representative currently known proteins are of the overall potential diversity can help inform strategies for a wide range of applications, including therapeutic, biocatalysis, or biomaterials development. Published in PNAS, an OIST-led international team investigated the relationship between protein evolution and sequence space, identifying the limiting factors behind protein diversification. Their findings reinforce theories of DNA recombination as a driving force of ancestral protein formation and highlight the limitations of many cutting-edge AI protein design methods.

AMHERST, Mass. — Scientists in the Riccio College of Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Santa Barbara have demonstrated key laser and ion trap components necessary to help drastically shrink the size of quantum computers, an achievement aligned with the shrinking of integrated microprocessors in the 1970s, 80s and 90s that allowed computers to move from room-sized behemoths to today’s ultrathin smartphones.

Virtual reality feels more “real” when users can touch a physical prop, but most haptic proxies follow a one-object-one-model approach that is costly and hard to deploy. A new fabric topological haptic proxy (FTHP) integrates origami-inspired constraints and embedded sensing fibers so a single cloth can switch among flat, folded and transforming states for different interactions. A lightweight neural network decodes the signals and achieves about 92.4% action recognition accuracy.