Flexible electronics can transform forest and veterinary health monitoring by enabling real-time, non-invasive tracking of plant physiology, animal vital signs and environmental conditions. This Review explores wearable and bioelectronic platforms for smart forestry and veterinary care, highlights their potential to improve ecosystem health and prevent disease outbreaks, and discusses key challenges and opportunities for scalable deployment.

Thin-film perovskites are excellent semiconductors for optoelectronics. This Review discusses their device design principles and film requirements, with a focus on how secondary bonds regulate crystallization to achieve high-quality films for high-performance devices.

As electric vehicles become tightly coupled to public charging infrastructure and power systems, battery safety extends beyond individual vehicles. Public charging networks could evolve from energy dispensers into shared ‘safety outposts’ that provide infrastructure-level protection for electric vehicle batteries.

Flying cars integrate ground-vehicle mobility with aircraft capabilities, making them candidates for deployment in the low-altitude economy and emergency rescue. We have advanced three enabling technologies — morphology design, multi-modal fusion perception, and active safety — across four generations of flying-car platforms.

Quantum sensing platforms offer contrasting solutions for scalable biomagnetic monitoring, yet the gulf between laboratory demonstrations and deployable systems in our daily life remains vast. This Comment summarizes the factors that determine how they can be realistically translated to clinical and consumer wearables.

Photonics Europe 2026 highlighted the role of photonic integrated circuits in next-generation computing, communications and quantum applications.

Electrical engineering research at Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) integrates physical AI, human digital twin and quantum sensing with advanced semiconductor fabrication and quantum-dot optoelectronics, translating innovation in nanoscale materials into scalable sensing and imaging technologies for next-generation intelligent systems.

A Nature study uses AI to rapidly design thermoelectric generators — devices that turn waste heat into electricity — yielding prototypes with record-level conversion efficiencies.

As electric vehicles become tightly coupled to public charging infrastructure and power systems, battery safety extends beyond individual vehicles. Public charging networks could evolve from energy dispensers into shared ‘safety outposts’ that provide infrastructure-level protection for electric vehicle batteries.

Eun-Ho Lee and Hyungpil Moon talk to Nature Reviews Electrical Engineering about AI robotics applications in manufacturing systems at Sungkyunkwan University, including work integrating factory data, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and equipment tailored to real-world manufacturing needs.