Fluorescence microscopes lose over half the emitted light, limiting image clarity. Weidong Yang and colleagues here report the Paired-Objectives Photon Enhancement method to double photon capture, enhancing brightness and resolution in biological imaging.

Dao-Yuan Tan and colleagues present a real-time acoustic sensing system with hierarchical clustering for monitoring large-diameter aqueduct flow states. A 6 km aqueduct case study demonstrated improved water management and infrastructure reliability.

Analog resistive synapses enable neuromorphic learning, but result in imprecision that limits inference accuracy. Peng Zhou and colleagues propose and experimentally demonstrate analog Hebbian learning via stochastic switching of stable binary magnetic tunnel junctions that enable high-accuracy inference.

In nature, raptors exhibit remarkable hunting abilities through their adept use of rapid aerial manoeuvres. Inspired by this capability, Guangze Liu and colleagues report a highly manoeuvrable flapping-wing robot with a self-adjusting tail, which enables manipulating the relative positions of the centre of gravity and aerodynamic centre and thereby enhancing the agile manoeuvrability performance.

Real-time long-horizon temperature prediction in metal additive manufacturing is critical for process control and quality assurance. Mingxuan Tian and colleagues propose a physics-informed machine learning model to predict temperature field for future 1.25 s.

Handling large volumes of recorded data is a challenge in high-density brain implants. Mahdi Nekoui and Amir Sodagar propose a hardware-efficient method to compress neural spikes by fitting primitive curves to a small number of salient spike samples.

Siyu Chen, Zheli Liu and colleagues propose a holistic co-design optical communication scheme based on the self-homodyne coherent structure, anti-resonant hollow core fibre, and Fermat number transform. This scheme provides a promising path for the realization of high-speed data centre optical interconnect with low power consumption and low latency.

Yongfei Zhao and colleagues report the aerodynamic behaviour of an oscillating airfoil in various turbulence. It could serve as a foundation for aerodynamic analysis to examine the stability of airfoils in turbulent flows.

Yang Bai and colleagues propose a hypersonic levitation and spinning technique for rapid tissue dissociation. The method enables fast acquisition of high-quality single cells, preserves rare cell types, and supports single-cell sequencing.

Higgins M. Wilson and colleagues report a high-performance interfacial steam generator that combines solar and high-power Joule heating for rapid water evaporation. This was enabled by a stable, low-resistance glassy carbon sponge and a high-power electric supply

The use of synthetic medical data (SMD) in AI development is on the rise, but its broader application is limited by the lack of a comprehensive evaluation framework. Here, Ghada Zamzmi and colleagues present a novel evaluation framework tailored for medical applications, along with an SMD scorecard that quantitatively assesses synthetic datasets across seven key criteria.

Large language models show remarkable potential in healthcare but face critical explainability challenges that must be addressed before widespread clinical deployment. Here, Munib Mesinovic, Peter Watkinson and Tingting Zhu examine technical and regulatory solutions needed to develop trustworthy, transparent large language models for responsible healthcare integration.

Professor Danielle Densley Tingley is an environmental engineer based at the University of Sheffield in the UK. Her research focusses on reducing the impact of the built environment on the planet using a number of strategies. Here, Dani shares her perspectives on the benefits of collaborative R&D in building a research career and in addressing grand challenges.

Academic and professional editors share their thoughts on the features of high-quality engineering research papers.

Satellites are crowding orbital space, particularly Low Earth Orbit, exacerbating the risk of orbital debris. In this Commentary, Mia Bennett recommends measures across the satellite life cycle to promote space sustainability including stronger regulations, fiscal and market-based interventions, multilateral institutions and active debris removal.

Operational data of lithium-ion batteries from battery electric vehicles can be logged and used to model lithium-ion battery aging, i.e., the state of health. Here, we discuss future State of Health definitions, the use of data from battery production beyond production, the logging & aggregation of operational data and challenges of the State of Health in automotive applications. Our suggestions could improve data transfer efficiency and data storage costs.