Kyoto, Japan -- Structural metals used in engineering projects are expected to have both high strength and high ductility: an ability to withstand heavy loads and deform before failure. Achieving both of these properties at the same time, however, is challenging.

An important measure of ductility is uniform elongation, or the amount of deformation a metal can sustain before it concentrates in one small area, resulting in a fracture. Some metals become stronger as they are deformed -- a phenomenon known as strain hardening -- so if a material can continue to harden sufficiently during deformation, theoretically uniform stretching can be maintained. However, a metal's effectiveness usually decreases as deformation continues. While some advanced metals obtain additional strain hardening from deformation-twinning and martensitic transformation, these processes tend to compete with each other, so metals are commonly designed to rely predominantly on just one or the other.

A team of researchers at Kyoto University wondered if both mechanisms could be activated in the same material at different stages of deformation, and hypothesized this could cause strains to harden sequentially rather than compete with each other. They proposed a strategy in which different deformation mechanisms are activated in sequence, with each providing additional strain hardening as the previous step becomes less effective.

Researchers have developed a novel composite hydrogel film that combines a polyacrylamide and calcium alginate polymer network with in-situ calcium carbonate mineralization. This innovative approach provides a new structural method for regulating film swelling and enabling the controlled release of phycocyanin, a bioactive pigment-protein complex known for its antioxidant and antibacterial properties. The findings, recently published by Frontiers of Materials Science, open promising avenues for advanced biomedical applications, including wound dressings and tissue engineering.

This study proposes a novel transmission framework that integrates a nonlinear companding-based PAPR reduction method with the Digital Post-Distortion (DPoD) technique to balance power efficiency and Bit Error Rate (BER) performance. To recover the transmitted signals, a Successive Decision Feedback Nonlinearity Equalizer (SDFNE) is developed at the receiver side. The SDFNE employs a time-domain least squares equalizer with closed-loop iterative feedback to jointly mitigate companding distortion and PA nonlinearity. The proposed framework balances transmitter-side PAPR suppression and receiver-side nonlinear equalization. This enables the PA to operate closer to its saturation point while achieving excellent BER performance. Meanwhile, compliance with spectral emission mask requirements is maintained. Numerical results on diverse PA models demonstrate that the proposed transmission framework with the SDFNE method significantly outperforms conventional nonlinear signal processing methods, including nonlinear companding, digital predistortion, and DPoD. Superior BER performance is achieved in a power-efficient manner, making the proposed framework particularly suitable for resource-constrained communication systems.

A bioinspired bead-on-string Ag/AgCl heterostructure for stable ion-electron transduction in stretchable dry electrodes is developed, opening a route to long-term, high-fidelity wearable electrophysiological monitoring and personalized hands-free human-machine interaction.

This work develops an asymmetric polarization strategy for covalent triazine frameworks (CTFs) by introducing naphthalene units to strengthen the internal electric field and promote charge separation. The resulting CTF-P1 achieves an H₂O₂ production rate of 2762.0 μmol g⁻¹ h⁻¹ in pure water without sacrificial agents. Mechanistic studies reveal that enhanced polarization facilitates both oxygen reduction and water oxidation, enabling efficient photocatalytic H₂O₂ synthesis.

Under the dual challenges of global climate change and food security, agricultural environmental monitoring is at a critical juncture of transitioning from “passive remediation after the event” to “proactive prevention and control in advance.” With the development of smart agriculture, although mobile robots and multimodal sensors have addressed the problems of low efficiency and high cost in traditional manual sampling, most existing monitoring solutions remain at the “post-event detection” stage—that is, pollution has already occurred before an alarm finally arrives, causing control measures to often lag behind. To truly achieve green and sustainable agricultural development, there is an urgent need to give mobile robots a “smart brain”, enabling them not only to perceive the present but also to accurately predict the dynamic trends of pollutants based on complex environmental data.

This study proposes a novel Alamouti-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system that mitigates constructive and destructive interference in practical multi-antenna wireless communications. Experimental results across multiple scenarios demonstrate that, under spatial misalignment, the Alamouti-OFDM system provides a maximum Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) gain of 3.45 dB over traditional diversity transmission systems; in scenarios where traditional methods exhibit  > 10 dB spectral fluctuations, our system confines the spectral variations of the received signals within 2 dB.

A new study examines how limited parking affects electric vehicle commuters and shows that parking permit schemes can reduce inefficient competition for spaces. By modelling commuting, charging and parking decisions across multiple travel corridors, the researchers find that carefully designed permit allocation can lower system-wide travel costs while revealing important trade-offs between efficiency and equity.