Behind the Paper
The real stories behind the latest research papers, from conception to publication, the highs and the lows
Making “Non-Stick” Fluoropolymers Stick: A Dry Plasma Route to Strong Rubber–Fluoropolymer Composite Tubes
PFA fluoropolymers resist heat and chemicals but hardly bond to rubber. We use dry dielectric barrier discharge in acrylic acid vapor to activate PFA tubes, enabling strong hot-pressed bonding to AEM rubber without wet etching.
Meta-microscope for high-quality phase imaging
Compact, stable metasurface-based microscope is established for quantitative phase imaging of transparent samples with high resolution and large field-of-view (FOV).
Carbon Quantum Dots as Multifunctional Nanomaterials for Sustainable Optoelectronic Biosensing and Green Photonics
Carbon Quantum Dots—Tiny Lights for Cleaner Water, Better Sensing, and Greener Photonics
How an ancient autophagy pathway shaped glycogen-based energy strategies in animals
By integrating molecular evolution with autophagy function, our Communications Biology study reveals how protein structural evolution shapes clade-specific diversification in glycogen utilization, offering new mechanistic insight into the evolutionary dynamics of energy metabolism.
Making cells bigger to see what was previously invisible
How signals move inside living cells has been hard to see because cells are small and signals propagate fast. We enlarged Dictyostelium cells by blocking division without harming function, enabling direct visualization of front–rear cAMP and calcium signal flow in single living cells.
