Using the human body to transmit signals, Georgia Tech engineers have created a wireless networking system that allows tiny implantable sensors and actuators to communicate with each other and with wearable devices. Their system means devices can work together like never before, sensing in one part of the body and triggering a therapeutic response elsewhere—perhaps releasing medicine or stimulating a nerve.

Imagine if your car weren't powered by a conventional battery under the hood but by energy stored in its walls or even its roof? This is a future that Dr. Bhagya Dharmasiri and her colleagues at the Deakin Institute for Frontier Materials have been exploring, bringing load-bearing structures and rechargeable energy storage together to create structural battery composites.

Reinforced concrete floor slabs account for about 40% of buildings' embodied carbon emissions. Until now, however, there has been no practical alternative for complex, multistory buildings.

Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Anupam Pandey's research team has found that microscopic folds in soft materials can act like tiny, programmable traffic gates for liquid droplets. The folds can stop droplets, let them pass or merge them together without surface coatings or additional hardware. Remarkably, the droplets never touch the fold. They sense it from a distance and slow down, stop short or change course in response. The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Queensland researchers have reached a milestone in powering Australia's critical minerals refining industry, successfully delivering the nation's first grid-connected sodium-sulfur (NaS) battery energy storage system enabled by Queensland-made DC-DC converters.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have developed a computational method that could help electric grid operators and data center developers manage power more efficiently as artificial intelligence drives unprecedented growth in electricity demand.

The animals may help reveal the causes of brain disease in people and point the way to treatments. But researchers already are calling for new ethical guidelines.

Deicing technologies often rely on heat to melt ice. But University of Texas at Dallas researchers have found that, under extreme cold, making ice even colder can weaken its grip on surfaces.

Storing energy as heat is a proven pathway to address the challenge solar power faces when it's dark or cloudy outside by enabling the capture, storage and on-demand release of thermal energy. The process, called high-temperature thermal energy storage (TES), however, can be prohibitively expensive.

A Maine lobster can end up in a roll, a bisque or a butter bath. At the University of Maine, what's left of it can now end up under a golf ball. Researchers at UMaine are making golf tees from discarded lobster shells. The project builds on more than a decade of UMaine research into new uses for an underutilized byproduct of Maine's lobster industry.

The Smart Materials research unit, coordinated by Athanassia Athanassiou, deputy scientific director of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia) in Genoa, Italy, has developed a new method to make wood flexible in a controlled way and therefore easier to shape. Unlike current approaches, which are more energy-intensive or less sustainable, IIT's treatment could offer a green alternative.

Researchers at The University of Manchester, Shandong Jiaotong University and Harbin Engineering University have developed a machine learning framework that enables rapid predictions of how protected steel beams respond during a fire, offering engineers a faster way to assess fire safety performance in industrial structures.

Western University engineers have taken a major step toward solving a long-standing challenge in nuclear power. Their study, published in Nature Communications, describes for the first time how hydrogen can combine with zirconium to form tiny, brittle structures that create intense stresses in CANDU reactor pressure tubes. These stresses may cause the surrounding metal to deform and even crack.

A satellite phased-array transceiver that folds up for launch and unfolds in space has been shown to work successfully in orbit, as reported by researchers from Science Tokyo. By using an innovative approach to correct nonplanar deformations in the deployable membrane antenna, this work lays the foundation for satellite constellation-based wireless communications in the Beyond 5G and 6G era.

A new stretchable quantum-dot light-emitting diode (QLED) delivers incredibly high resolution while producing record brightness that can be clearly viewed even outside in direct sunlight.

In a recent paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, Korean researchers unveiled a new QLED material with applications far beyond televisions, stretching into many future daily-use technologies.

This new QLED can stretch in every direction, just like organic skin, making it extremely useful in future wearable applications and as a covering for soft robots. Unlike earlier attempts to make a stretchable QLED, this one doesn’t lose picture quality when it stretches, delivering high resolution and extreme brightness under tension.

QLED Explained

For most of us, QLEDs are familiar as one of the technologies available in modern televisions. Conventional QLED TVs use quantum dots—nanoscale semiconductor crystals—to help produce exceptionally bright and vivid colors. OLED displays, by comparison, use self-emissive pixels that can switch off individually, allowing them to produce deeper blacks. While OLEDs perform particularly well in dark viewing environments, the high brightness achievable with quantum-dot displays can make them especially well-suited for brightly lit environments.

Despite the technology’s suitability for the bright world around us rather than just darkened environments, major challenges remained in producing a stretchable version. Early attempts addressed the problem by allowing the wiring to stretch while the light-emitting pixels remained unchanged in size. This meant that as the material expanded, its effective resolution dropped because the same number of pixels became spread across a wider area, much like enlarging a low-resolution digital image.

Building on these efforts, some researchers attempted to replace conventional materials with more stretchable alternatives, but these tended to make achieving high resolutions and efficiently moving electrical charge through the material difficult. As a result, these systems produced dimmer, lower-resolution images, limiting their utility.

A New Process

The researchers developed a new fabrication approach to address some of the major problems facing stretchable QLED technology. Central to their innovation is the use of an elastic polymer incorporating MPA as a ligand, or bonding molecule. This approach improves charge injection efficiency while helping eliminate the image stretching and smearing that have affected previous stretchable displays.

Using this new process, the researchers produced a display with a resolution of about 16,000 pixels per inch, with features spaced at roughly 700 nanometers. Red, green, and blue emissive layers can also be precisely arranged, allowing the stretchable material to produce full-color images.

Testing a New QLED

In tests, the team’s new QLED proved to be a major advance. They successfully stretched the material to 1.65 times its original size with no damage to its light-emitting performance. Additionally, their stretchable QLEDs were the brightest ever tested at 53,300 nits, more than triple the brilliance of prior attempts.

Based on these tests, the researchers see numerous future applications for their material in extended reality devices, soft robots, electronic skin, wearable technologies, health care, and automotive displays. 

“We resolved both the drop in resolution and the limits on light-emitting performance, which had been the biggest challenges for stretchable displays, and secured core technology for commercialization,” concluded co-author Professor Moon Kee Choi of Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in Korea. “It will be used widely as a manufacturing platform for various next-generation soft devices, including wearables and electronic skin.”

The paper, “High-Resolution Intrinsically Stretchable Quantum-Dot Displays Through Thermally Assisted Intaglio Transfer Printing,” appeared in Nature Nanotechnology on September 14, 2026.

Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.

Scientists have developed a low-cost device that can continuously check air ducts at nuclear facilities for traces of radioactive material. The detector, created at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, or ORNL, can take measurements once a minute when running on a battery. When connected through an Ethernet cable, it can collect […]

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Scientists have developed a new way to make an extremely strong metal-based material much less likely to break when it is bent or squeezed. The discovery could eventually lead to tougher materials for aircraft engines, turbines, energy systems and other machines that operate under extreme conditions. The research was led by engineers at Purdue University […]

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Corrosion is a major concern for aging steel bridges because progressive material loss can affect their long-term serviceability and, in severe cases, structural safety. Visual inspection remains indispensable for assessing bridge condition, but inspectors must evaluate corrosion under widely varying conditions, including differences in lighting, coating color, shadows, surface deposits, structural geometry and accessibility. These factors can make consistent corrosion assessment challenging.

Researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) developed a new type of monitor that can check every minute or even every second for the buildup of nuclear material in the air ducts of nuclear fuel cycle facilities, promoting high standards of safety and security.

Scientists have used an X-ray detector on a sounding rocket, a type of research rocket that flies to the edge of space, then returns to Earth within minutes, to document metal dendrites—the branching structures that form as liquid metal cools—forming in microgravity conditions for the first time. By analyzing the images using machine learning, they reveal insights that could improve how metal components are solidified and manufactured.