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Kambez Benam reviews preclinical approaches to assess lung health impacts of e-cigarettes, highlighting limitations of current strategies in capturing 3D lung architecture and inhalation mechanics. The review article emphasizes the promise of Organs-on-Chips and Bioinspired Robotics.
Xiaofei Ma and colleagues provide a review of high-strain composite materials and their use in deployable space structures. The review contributes a broad overview of the field and discusses important design considerations for high-strain composite structures including manufacturing, viscoelasticity, and material selection.
In this Perspective, Manohar and colleagues introduce super phantoms as digital or physical models capable of mimicking complex tissue characteristics for imaging methods. They discuss phantoms as crucial for testing of new imaging technologies, and address critical issues surrounding their development and implementation.
In a Review Article, Jonathan Sauder and colleagues develop a framework to categorize the variety of deployable structures and mechanisms available for operation on small satellites.
This review explores adaptive neuron models from computational neuroscience, emphasizing their significance in the future development of power efficient artificial intelligence applications and hardware integration.
The Editorial Board and Editorial Team are delighted to present a selection of short Research Highlights describing some of our favourite Communications Engineering publications of 2023.
Elastocaloric cooling devices utilize the latent heat that shape memory alloys generate when subjected to stress to generate large temperature variations. Wang and colleagues discuss key challenges of the practical application of elastocaloric cooling systems including materials fabrication, force actuation and heat transfer enhancement.
Supernumerary robotic limbs are robotic devices providing additional limbs to the user. Mattia Pinardi and colleagues review the impact of supplementary sensory feedback on the control performance and embodiment of supernumerary robotic limbs.
Metabolic syndrome is a risk factor for developing cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes. Lyzwinski, Elgendi and colleagues discuss the potential role of sweat-based wearable technologies for monitoring metabolic syndrome along with engineering challenges towards implementation and optimization
Ahmed Othman and colleagues review flow control strategies used by birds, insects and aquatic animals, and how they have been adopted in engineered devices. The focus on passive and local flow control is of particular relevance to the design of small uncrewed aerial and aquatic vehicles.
The climate crisis, the Covid pandemic and rapid urban growth amongst other factors are leaving populations increasingly vulnerable to breakdown in key infrastructure systems. This includes the built structures that form our living and working environment, the transport and communications networks that serve us and the utilities that enable us to live comfortably.
Space bioprocess engineering integrates synthetic biology and bioprocess engineering with the specific goal to support human life in long term space missions. In this Perspective, Berliner and colleagues describe a pathway towards the development and implementation of space bioprocessing technologies of the future.