s human-caused climate change continues to raise temperatures across the globe, understanding how birds regulate their temperature is vital for their conservation. But how much heat birds emit—an invisible spectrum of radiation known as mid-infrared—has never been studied, until now. Published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology, a groundbreaking collaboration between material engineers and museum biologists explored the impact of mid-infrared on birds for the first time in history, reflecting the hidden prism of light, heat, and color in bird feathers.  

It’s long been known that habitat plays a role in bird coloration, a phenomenon described by biologists through things like Gloger’s rule, which predicts that animals like birds living in hot, humid areas will be visibly darker than those in dry, cool areas. Color is part of the electromagnetic spectrum, a visible wavelength that humans can see part of (the visible spectrum), and birds can see even more of (the ultraviolet spectrum), but heat, or infrared, exists outside the bounds of what either humans or birds can see. Infrared is broken down into the heat animals absorb (near-infrared) but not the heat they emit (mid-infrared). The interdisciplinary team of scientists measured both in the new study.

Recently, a research team led by Prof. Dexin Ye from Zhejiang University, Prof. Yu Luo from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Prof. Jingjing Zhang from Southeast University addressed a pivotal challenge in the field of transformation optics (TO). By synergizing the Brewster-effect with Fabry-Pérot resonances, the team successfully overcame the fundamental conflict between bandwidth and geometric complexity in TO devices, thereby overcoming the persistent bandwidth limitations that have hindered practical implementations of this transformative technology. This work has been published in National Science Review, entitled "Breaking Bandwidth Limits in Transformation Optics with Brewster-Enhanced Metamaterials," with Dr. Xiaojun Hu from Zhejiang University as the first author, Prof. Yu Luo, Prof. Jingjing Zhang and Prof. Dexin Ye as corresponding authors.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a platform that lets lab-grown muscle tissues train themselves to record-breaking strength, with no external stimulation required. By mechanically coupling two muscle tissues so they continuously pull against each other, their own natural contractions become a round-the-clock workout. The resulting muscles powered OstraBot, an ostraciiform (a type of fish locomotion) swimming robot that reached 467 millimetres per minute — the fastest speed reported for any skeletal muscle-driven biohybrid robot.

The advance removes a long-standing bottleneck in biohybrid robotics — machines driven by living cells rather than conventional motors. Because muscle-based actuators are soft, quiet and efficient at small scales, stronger versions could unlock minimally invasive biomedical tools, soft environmental sensors and fully biodegradable robots that safely degrade after completing their task.

Semiconductor chips are built layer by layer, with each film typically under 100 nm thick—thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Ensuring these layers are perfectly uniform across an entire wafer is critical, but existing metrology tools are too slow for mass production. Researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology have developed a new optical instrument that measures wafer thin films with picometer precision in a single snapshot, enabling dynamic measurement 100 times faster than current commercial tools.