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As humanity stands on the precipice of becoming a multi-planetary species, with crewed missions to Mars and beyond transitioning from science fiction to concrete engineering roadmaps, we must confront the immense challenge of ensuring human health far from Earth. A three-year mission to Mars will be the longest and most

Conventional microfluidic systems, the "lab-on-a-chip" technologies that underpin much of modern biology and chemistry, rely on a hardware-based paradigm. Their channels, mixers, valves, and pumps are physically etched into materials like glass or PDMS, creating a fixed and immutable architecture. This approach, while powerful, suffers from inherent limitations:

Conventional 3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), has fundamentally changed prototyping and manufacturing by building objects layer-by-layer. However, this sequential approach suffers from inherent limitations: it is often slow, requires extensive support structures for complex geometries, and introduces anisotropic mechanical properties due to the layered interfaces. A revolutionary new paradigm,

The ability to design proteins from first principles—'de novo' design—represents a grand challenge in biotechnology and medicine. For decades, scientists have sought to create bespoke proteins tailored for specific functions, from high-affinity therapeutics to novel industrial enzymes. This endeavor, however, has been profoundly difficult, limited by

The existence of dark matter is one of the most profound puzzles in modern physics, inferred from its gravitational effects on galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe, yet its composition remains unknown. Among the leading candidates is the axion, a hypothetical elementary particle originally proposed to solve the

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) represent a class of thousands of synthetic chemicals characterized by chains of carbon atoms saturated with fluorine atoms. The carbon-fluorine (C-F) bond is one of the strongest in organic chemistry, granting these compounds exceptional thermal and chemical stability. This has made them invaluable in a

The convergence of biotechnology and information technology has opened a frontier that was, until recently, the exclusive domain of science fiction: the creation of biocomputing systems. At the heart of this revolution is Organoid Intelligence (OI), an emerging field predicated on the integration of self-assembling 3D human brain organoids with

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) stands as a powerful, non-invasive neuroimaging technique that directly measures the faint magnetic fields generated by synchronous neural activity. It offers superior temporal resolution to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), tracking brain processes on a millisecond scale. However, conventional MEG technology is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on

The discovery of advanced materials has historically been the engine of human progress, from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age. However, the traditional process of materials discovery is notoriously slow, expensive, and reliant on a combination of intuition, serendipity, and painstaking trial-and-error. In a world facing urgent challenges in

The exponential growth of consumer electronics has engendered a parallel crisis: a burgeoning mountain of electronic waste (e-waste) laden with both toxic materials and valuable metals. Within this waste stream lies a particularly critical resource: rare earth elements (REEs), which are indispensable for modern technologies ranging from smartphones and electric

Triboelectrification, the process by which materials become electrically charged after coming into contact and then separating, is a ubiquitous phenomenon in granular media undergoing aeolian (wind-driven) transport. This mechanism not only influences particle motion and aggregation but also shapes the morphogenesis of dunes and dust activity across Earth and Mars.

The dawn of multi-messenger astronomy, heralded by the coincident detection of gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic radiation from the binary neutron star merger GW170817, has opened a new window into the most extreme environments in the universe. This event confirmed that neutron star mergers are a site of heavy element

Endogenous viral elements (EVEs), remnants of ancient viral infections archived within host genomes, provide a unique molecular record of past host-pathogen interactions. Paleogenomic approaches have begun to unlock these traces from ancient DNA (aDNA) recovered from subfossil or permafrost-preserved remains, offering new perspectives on how viral insertions have influenced host