SAN ANTONIO —September 17, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and The University of Texas at San Antonio (UT San Antonio) will flight test novel electrolyzer technology to better understand chemical processes associated with bubble formation in low gravity. Designed to solve future space mission challenges, the project, led by SwRI’s Kevin Supak and UT San Antonio’s Dr. Shrihari Sankarasubramanian, is supported by a $125,000 grant from the Connecting through Research Partnerships (Connect) program, which fosters collaboration between the two institutions. It is also supported by the university’s Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design (KCEID) and the Center for Space Technology and Operation Research (CSTOR).

For the first time, scientists fabricate multi-layer, reconfigurable batteries that can bend, adapt, and tune their own voltage — offering a potential power source for future wearable devices, sensors, and soft robotics.

In International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing (IJEM), a research team in China reports the first fabrication of multi-layer flexible batteries using a combination of liquid metal microfluidic perfusion and plasma-based reversible bonding techniques.

A project at Lund University in Sweden has trained an AI model to identify breast cancer patients who could be spared from axillary surgery. The model analyses previously unutilised information in mammograms and pinpoints with high accuracy the individual risk of metastasis in the armpit. A newly completed study shows that the model indicates that just over 40 per cent of today’s axillary surgery procedures could be avoided.

The tumor microenvironment (TME) is a complex and dynamic ecosystem that plays a pivotal role in cancer progression and therapy resistance. Its heterogeneity and constant remodeling present significant challenges for effective treatment. The emergence of nanomedicine integrates nanotechnology and medicine, aiming to overcome and ameliorate the limitations of conventional therapeutic agents in cancer treatment. Despite the broad biomedical applications of nanomaterials, the clinical translation of nanodrugs remains hindered by the complexity and heterogeneity of the TME as well as challenges related to the physicochemical properties of nanomaterials. This paper published in iMetaMed underscores key challenges and difficulties currently faced by nanomaterials in cancer treatment, including: issues related to nanomaterial biosafety and long-term toxicity assessment; uncertainties in vivo biotransformation and metabolic pathways; therapeutic efficacy variations caused by spatiotemporal heterogeneity of the TME; barriers from laboratory research to clinical translation; and insufficient selectivity in the precise modulation of TME components.

Biomedical research data visualization faces several challenges, including insufficient expertise and fragmented methodologies, which severely limit research efficiency and result quality. FigureYa is a standardized visualization framework composed of 317 modular R scripts, rather than a standalone software or desktop application. It covers key domains such as expression profiling, immune analysis, survival analysis, and single-cell data visualization. Based on the concept of “replace data and use,” FigureYa significantly lowers the technical threshold, allowing researchers to generate high-quality charts without requiring an extensive programming background. Compared to generic online R code snippets, FigureYa offers rigorously developed, thoroughly validated, and biologically contextualized visualization modules originally written by the author team. Each script includes version-matched environments, example datasets, and detailed annotations, providing clear advantages in automation, reproducibility, and scientific professionalism, thereby providing a standardized visualization solution for complex biomedical data. This innovative tool optimizes research time allocation, promotes interdisciplinary collaboration, accelerates scientific discovery and clinical translation, and provides robust data visualization support for biomedical research.