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Featuring AI-era light-field detection, multidimensional optical singularities, 2D-material electronic biosensors, climate-resilient power systems and advances in metamaterials.

Featured

  • Liquid metals (LMs) combine metallic electrical and thermal conductivity with soft, deformable mechanics for soft electronics. This Review highlights LM composite and structural material strategies, with a focus on interfacial design that enables stable, high-resolution patterning and reliable integration in wearable, implantable and soft robotic systems

    • Chengfeng Pan
    • Chong Zhang
    • Michael D. Dickey
    Review Article

  • Battery energy storage systems now serve evolving roles across grids, vehicles and second-life applications. The resulting operational drift undermines predictive maintenance. This Perspective maps that drift onto layered mismatches, matches each with transfer strategies and audit dimensions, and charts the data-infrastructure, foundation-model, benchmark and regulatory backbones needed for life-cycle-wide deployment.

    • Shengyu Tao
    • Chen Liang
    • Changfu Zou
    Perspective

  • Multimodal semantic communication targets the efficient and reliable transmission of data from multiple modalities. This Review highlights its transition from multimedia communication, theory and deep learning-based methods with applications from autonomous vehicles to satellites, and outlines future token communication.

    • Zhijin Qin
    • Jingkai Ying
    • Wen Tong
    Review Article

  • Artificial intelligence (AI) has accelerated perovskite solar cell research in narrow settings but is yet to deliver insights that generalize. This Review examines what AI has and has not achieved for perovskite photovoltaics, why its impact remains limited and how integrated AI frameworks could span the full research pipeline.

    • Yifan Li
    • Wei Liu
    • Guixiang Li
    Review Article

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Volume 3 Issue 10
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Announcements

  • Intelligent Telecommunications

    The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Francis Halzen “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin”. This collection pulls together a Review by Halzen, research articles from the IceCube Collaboration and from across the high-energy neutrino detection landscape.

  • Sustainable electronics

    This Focus explores sustainable electronics that deliver high performance while reducing energy consumption, material waste and overall environmental impact, featuring indium selenides for next-generation low-power computing, organic electrochemical transistors for integrated sensing–memory–computing hardware, and packaging and integration of silicon carbide power devices.

  • Net zero in power and energy

    This Focus explores how intelligent power systems and sustainable energy technologies are driving the transition towards net-zero emissions, capturing a field in rapid evolution, one poised to reshape how we generate, deliver and store clean energy.

  • neuromorphic devices

    This Focus highlights advances in neuromorphic devices for bio-inspired sensing, computing and human–machine interfaces, emphasizing stretchable electronics, olfactory chips, somatosensory feedback, and UK national centres driving innovation in brain-like, energy-efficient technologies.

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Latest Reviews & Analysis

    • Cell-stacked three-dimensional dynamic random-access memory (3D DRAM) solves the lateral scaling limits of conventional DRAM. This Review shows that cell-stacked 3D DRAM has excellent integration density and outlines the remaining key challenges in cell transistors, capacitors, interconnects and process integration.

      • Joon Young Kang
      • Jinheon Choi
      • Cheol Seong Hwang
      Review Article

    • Conventional topological waveguiding is edge-confined and depends on bulky, transport-inactive insulating regions. An insulator-free design now enables topologically protected bulk transport across multiple lanes, offering a compact, robust platform for photonic circuits.

      • Sunkyu Yu
      • Namkyoo Park
      News & Views

    • Battery integration determines how much cell-level performance survives as usable system energy. This Review examines integration as a reassignment of functions, asking when removing structure adds value, when it becomes counterproductive and how the same principle extends across electric vehicles, aircraft, robots and next-generation battery cells.

      • Hai-Peng Liang
      • Hansen Wang
      • Chuying Ouyang
      Review Article

    • Ising machines could accelerate hard optimization and sampling tasks, but their impact depends on algorithm–hardware co-design. This Review surveys portable probabilistic methods, from annealing and tempering to Probabilistic Approximate Optimization Algorithm and generative AI hybrids, arguing that principled algorithms and specialized hardware should evolve together to expand capability, scalability and practical adoption.

      • Corentin Delacour
      • Xiuqi Zhang
      • Kerem Y. Camsari
      Review Article

    • Renewable-dominated power grids are increasingly exposed to cyberattacks that reach through digital control systems into physical infrastructure. This Perspective argues that cyber and physical defences must operate as a single end-to-end pipeline across the full attack life cycle and shows how the coordination between them maintains power supply during compromise.

      • Mengxiang Liu
      • Thomas Parisini
      • Fei Teng
      Perspective

News & Comment

  • Materials define the fundamental boundaries of battery performance, and systems engineering is how the industry will unlock them, says Chuying Ouyang, vice president of CATL. He talks ultra-fast charging, AI already working in factories and why electrical engineers underestimate how designable batteries really are.

    • Chuying Ouyang
    • Jiahao Liu
    Q&A

  • The Nobel Symposium on Metamaterials Science and Technology: Structuring Light and Sound in Space and Time offered a timely reflection on how far metamaterials have come, from a provocative concept in wave control to a broad scientific framework for designing physical functionality and opening new technological opportunities.

    • Rachel Won
    Research Highlight

  • Sir John B. Pendry explains how dynamic metamaterials — from tunable structures to true space–time-modulated media — could transform the control of light and sound, opening opportunities in communications, computing and acoustic engineering while revealing physics inaccessible to static materials.

    • John B. Pendry
    • Rachel Won
    Q&A

  • As metamaterials become tunable and reconfigurable, they are opening new routes to control waves directly within materials and enable new device architectures. David R. Smith reflects on the physics, applications, commercial impacts and translation challenges shaping the next stage of the field.

    • David R. Smith
    • Rachel Won
    Q&A

  • By addressing remaining hurdles, electrochemical lithium-ion intercalation-based exfoliation technology is expected to progress into a scalable and industry-compatible platform for manufacturing high-quality two-dimensional printed electronic materials.

    • Ruijie Yang
    • Yang Chai
    • Zhiyuan Zeng
    Lab to Fab

  • Ellen Roche, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Medical Engineering and Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, shares her excitement of developing technologies that cooperate with biology and restore natural function, as well as her vision as the mid-career winner of the 2026 Sony Women in Technology Award with Nature.

    • Ellen Roche
    • Rachel Won
    Q&A

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