Inspired by a hitchhiking fish that uses a specialized suction organ to latch onto other marine animals, MIT engineers designed a mechanical adhesive device that attaches to soft, slippery surfaces and remains there for days or weeks. The device could be used to deliver drugs in the GI tract or monitor aquatic environments.

A team led by Prof. DOU Xincun at the Xinjiang Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences synthesized a new covalent organic framework (COF)—a crystalline material made of a light element such as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, or oxygen, which can be customized at the molecular level. Using the new COF—dubbed tDACH—the researchers inserted cyclohexane-based linkers as conjugation "breakpoints," thereby engineering π-conjugated domains that enable intrinsic exciton confinement at the molecular scale.

MSK researchers learn that  immune cells are the unexpected source of a protein called FAS-ligand, which has undermined the cancer-fighting ability of engineered cell therapies. The team developed a way to re-engineer the cells to disable this natural brake.

Biologging is transforming wildlife research, yet stingrays have been overlooked due to their unusual body shapes. For the first time, researchers successfully developed and field-tested a biologging tag for the whitespotted eagle ray. The multi-sensor device stayed attached for up to a record 60 hours, revealing how they feed, move and interact with other species. Virtually impossible to capture before, these insights now shed light into this threatened, understudied species that plays a vital role in marine ecosystems.