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Engineering is the design and construction of systems and structures for influencing the world around us and enhancing our experience within it. Engineers use the fundamental principles of mathematics, physics and chemistry to create machines that enable us to travel faster, provide improved medical care, and process more complicated information.
Microneedle electrochemical sensors featuring sub-micrometre tips, nanostructured surfaces, and a strain-isolated biointerface decouple tissue motion from the sensing environment, enabling biomolecular monitoring during free movement.
A wearable patch continuously monitors cholesterol and triglycerides in sweat to track personalized metabolic responses to diet and exercise.
Lanthanides can be challenging to efficiently separate with high selectivity. Now, ionic channels in layered manganese oxide are shown to facilitate the aqueous separation of lanthanides through differences in confinement-induced phase changes and ion dehydration and coordination. Pinning the channel spacing with Mg2+ ions increases selectivity between pairs of light lanthanides.
Foot drop after stroke reduces toe clearance and walking safety. Here, Pan et al. report a gait-timing-adaptive, self-powered neuroprosthesis that harvests gait energy to augment ankle dorsiflexion, improving outdoor walking distance and speed, and reducing gait variability in stroke survivors.
Over 400 million people own a wearable that continuously monitors their health, yet clinicians struggle to act on the data they generate. Realizing their clinical value requires context-specific validation and an integration pipeline designed around end-use.
ICRA 2026 highlighted a decisive shift – future systems must be designed not only for autonomy and performance, but also for energy efficiency, material responsibility and sustainable lifecycles.
A paper in Nature Electronics reports a cracking-assisted transfer printing method that enables precise, high-resolution patterning of quantum dots (QDs) for full-colour QD-LED displays for future augmented reality/virtual reality and large-area display applications.
The materials sector in Europe is renowned for its research excellence but scale-up and industrialization of materials is less successful. The 2026 Advanced Materials Act is an opportunity to structurally reposition Europe in the global materials economy.
Spinal motor neurons offer a window into the neural control of movement, combining large-scale observability, physiological interpretability and direct coupling to behaviour. Population-scale recordings could transform human physiology from hypothesis-by-hypothesis investigation into artificial intelligence-driven discovery of general principles, while establishing a new foundation for scalable, physiologically grounded neural interfaces.
In many countries, female engineers are barred from entering deep mines to carry out studies. Differentiating risks can increase access while protecting safety.