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Untethered soft robots offer numerous advantages in terms of mobility, versatility, and autonomy, making them increasingly valuable for a wide range of applications. Jung et al. review the new types of untethered soft actuators that represent breakthroughs and discuss the future perspective of soft actuators.
Plants exhibit reproducible timing of developmental events at multiple scales, from switches in cell identity to maturation of the whole plant. Using simplified models to convey key concepts, we review how timing mechanisms interact with the environment to control cyclical and progressive developmental transitions.
Chemical recycling of plastic enables renewed production of pristine materials, but generally comes at a high energy cost. This review focuses on light-driven approaches for chemically recycling and upcycling plastic waste, with emphasis on reduced energy consumption and selective transformations of challenging to recycle backbone structures.
Despite the enormous progress in the field of giant lipid vesicles, their use for in vivo biomedical applications is limited. Here, the authors discuss red blood cells as inspiration for enhancing those vesicles, investigating the required cellular features and the corresponding technical hurdles.
This review focuses on recent advances in on-chip platforms for patient-like in vitro modeling of the pathology of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s diseases as well as Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. The authors advocate for broader usage of these human-relevant models in the academic and pharmaceutical fields.
Memristors hold promise for massively-parallel computing at low power. Aguirre et al. provide a comprehensive protocol of the materials and methods for designing memristive artificial neural networks with the detailed working principles of each building block and the tools for performance evaluation.
Aneurysmal subarachnoid haemorrhage, with its multisystem effects, presents a substantial challenge to clinicians. Here, the authors show the necessity for comprehensive multidisciplinary care and the urgent need for largescale studies to validate standardised treatment protocols for improved outcomes.
α,α-Disubstituted α-amino acids (α-AAs) have improved properties compared to other amino acids. Here, the authors provide an overview of the recent advancements since 2015 and discuss existing challenges for their synthesis.
Engineering the form and function of root systems and their associated microbiota could provide a means to mitigate adverse climate-driven effects. Here, the authors review the recent developments in plant and rhizobacterial synthetic biology and highlight engineering targets for applications in root systems and rhizosphere.
Genetic risk variants for autoimmune diseases are largely enriched in T cell-specific regulatory regions. In this review, Raychaudhuri and colleagues summarise the findings of recent studies evaluating the genetic regulation of T cell molecular and functional traits in these diseases.
