Cooperation exists in board games, among researchers and among bacteria. Working closely together locally, scientists have deciphered how two species of bacteria join forces to avoid being eaten.

A team from the Universitat Politècnica de València and the company Corify Care has made a major breakthrough in cardiac electrophysiology with the publication of its patented Global Volumetric Mapping technology in the journal Nature Communications Medicine. The publication validates the first system capable of simultaneously mapping all four chambers of the heart, providing physicians with a comprehensive, real-time view of arrhythmias that current solutions cannot offer.

Controlled manipulation of the fibers that are as thin as or even thinner than human hair is a real challenge. Despite the technology development, the precise and reversible change of the microfibers' orientation, like the tweezers, is not easy. The interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, has recently developed a way to control the shape of microfibers with electricity. This brings us closer to a novel technical solution in micromechanics and soft robotics. Their recent work, published in the Nature Communications journal, demonstrates the first proof-of-concept results on the motion of pristine carbon fibers caused by asymmetric electrochemical processes occurring in the material.

On 2 July, 2025, the China-led Einstein Probe (EP) space telescope detected an exceptionally bright X-ray source whose brightness varied rapidly during a routine sky survey. Its unusual signal immediately set it apart from ordinary cosmic sources, triggering rapid follow-up observations by telescopes worldwide.

This research was coordinated by the EP Science Center of the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences (NAOC), with participation from multiple research institutions in China and abroad. Astrophysicists from the Department of Physics at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), who are integral members of the EP scientific team, worked together with the broader collaboration to interpret the event, proposing that it may mark the moment when an intermediate-mass black hole tears apart and consumes a white dwarf star. If confirmed, this would be the first observational evidence of such an extreme black hole “feeding” process. The findings have been published as a cover article in Science Bulletin.

Constructed with tubulin heterodimers connected into a hollow cylinder, the microtubule, an essential component of the cytoskeleton, plays a vital role in various intracellular processes. In a groundbreaking study, a cross-disciplinary research team led by Professor Yuan Lin from the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering, and Professor Jeff Ti from the School of Biomedical Sciences in the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), has revealed how the biological function of microtubules is achieved through mechanical regulation at the tubulin level.