Researchers at Okayama University of Science are advancing Veterinary Medical Engineering through collaboration between veterinary medicine and engineering to improve the health and wellbeing of both animals and people. As part of the university’s “Quality of All Lives” Project, the team has developed Makiyoru ONE, a compact bandage pressure measurement device that enables veterinary nursing students to visualize and quantify bandaging pressure during practical training. By transforming tacit skills into measurable data, the device improves learning efficiency and helps students acquire clinical techniques more effectively. Beyond education, the project is developing innovative technologies for animal healthcare, livestock production, disaster preparedness with companion animals, and veterinary clinical practice. Guided by the concept of One Wellbeing, the initiative aims to establish the emerging field of Veterinary Medical Engineering while creating practical solutions that enhance the quality of life for both animals and humans.

The UJI Hand team from the Universitat Jaume I has won the 2nd University Prosthetic Hand Competition for the second consecutive year, reaffirming the title it achieved in the first edition of the national contest. Held this year at the Universitat Politècnica de València, the competition brought together 11 university teams from across Spain to test prosthetic hand designs through everyday tasks such as opening containers, writing on a tablet or manipulating objects with precision.

The UJI team stood out with the only fully mechanical prosthetic hand in the competition, entirely designed, manufactured and adjusted by the students themselves, including an innovative harness system that improves mobility, grip and precision. UJI Hand was the only team to successfully complete all 14 challenges in the first round, achieving the best time, and also obtained the top result in the second round.

How hawks adjust their movements during flight despite missing feathers while molting holds lessons for raptor rehabilitation and uncrewed aerial vehicles, finds a UC Davis study.

A research team of engineers at Penn State has developed a new design approach for optimizing internal fibers that could help cut the cost of ultra-high-performance concrete by up to 75%, while maintaining the material's exceptional strength and durability.

A team of engineers at Rice University and Kyung Hee University has developed a soft, shape-shifting mechanical surface that can respond to touch, sense its own movements and visually communicate changes in real time — an advance that could open new possibilities for human-machine interaction, wearable devices and immersive tactile displays.

In May 2024, auroras were observed at unusually low latitudes across the globe, lighting up skies that rarely see such displays. Inside Earth’s magnetosphere, the region of space surrounding our planet and dominated by its intrinsic magnetic field, something significant was finally being observed. It started with a large sunspot firing a rapid series of powerful solar eruptions. Clouds of magnetized plasma merged as they traveled through space and impacted Earth's magnetosphere. No geomagnetic storm this powerful had ever been measured in the Earth’s ring current region, a belt of charged particles in space near our planet. Two sources of ring current ions are known: solar wind and Earth's ionosphere, the electrically charged upper layer of the atmosphere. For decades, scientists have debated how much each source contributes to the ring current. During most storms, both contribute. However, during a storm driven by a dense solar wind, some scientists expected solar wind ions to continue to play a notable role. Yet the first direct measurements of ring current composition from a super geomagnetic storm revealed that solar wind ion contributions were minimal, and the level of Earth-origin ion dominance had never been observed before. The findings, published in Science Advances, suggest that understanding how much Earth's ionosphere contributes to the ring current may be essential to accurately predict the severity of super geomagnetic storms. The dominance of ionospheric ions, which are far heavier than solar wind particles, may have intensified the magnetic disturbance and concentrated the ring current peak unusually close to Earth. The researchers also make a case for a proposed Japanese multi-satellite mission to understand exactly how ion supply processes work.