Abstract From the 1930s through the 1950s, Metal Progress — the flagship publication of the American Society for Metals (now ASM International)—featured bold, distinctive cover designs. The artwork ranged from oil paintings and geometric abstractions to exquisite photography, all unified by a common thread: some reference, however stylized, to the processing or application of metals. This article features several striking examples of covers from that period.
Many design tasks can be cast as black-box function optimization, enabling use of Bayesian optimization to find an ideal design with minimal number of trials. However, often we do not actually need the optimum but instead a sufficiently good solution is enough, for instance a material that is durable enough for its intended use. In most cases there are multiple satisfactory solutions, forming a superlevel set of the function, raising a key question of which one to prefer. We answer this by explaining why robustness to input perturbations that may occur when the solution is deployed is a good criterion and by introduce a Bayesian optimization method that efficiently finds satisficing solutions that are robust to maximally large perturbations. In contrast to previous works, we assume the inputs can be accurately controlled during optimization, but will be perturbed after the deployment.
Abstract The Aluminaire House, the first all-metal residence in the U.S., pioneered aluminum and steel construction as a scalable, affordable housing prototype. Designed in 1930-1931 by A. Lawrence Kocher and Albert Frey, the structure demonstrated that factory- produced components—aluminum columns, steel decking, sheet metal cladding, and plate glass—could be rapidly and affordably assembled into a habitable dwelling. The house was recently restored and reinstalled at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
Metagenomic next-generation sequencing (mNGS) enables agnostic detection of bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites from clinical specimens. Patient access is restricted due to their current regulatory classification as Laboratory Developed Tests, which are offered by a limited number of laboratories. While patient access may be expanded through Food and Drug Administration authorization of mNGS-based in vitro diagnostics, some regulatory requirements for achieving this classification can be challenging to apply due to the agnostic nature of mNGS. For example, existing guidelines recommend organism-by-organism performance characterization similar to targeted molecular tests involving fixed analytes with stable detection thresholds. This mini-review synthesizes validation and regulatory challenges unique to mNGS-based diagnostics and describes how laboratories and developers currently navigate available pathways. We focus on core analytical and clinical validation challenges, including discussion on the central role of bioinformatics pipelines and reference databases. We then summarize practical considerations for regulatory engagement, labeling, clinical-facing reporting, and alignment of mNGS assays to existing quality system frameworks. Finally, we outline future oversight considerations, including the need to distinguish mNGS from multiplexed PCR paradigms and the potential value of modular, component-based regulatory approaches that separately evaluate reagents, instruments, software, and databases, enabling system-level oversight rather than organism-by-organism validation. Together, these considerations aim to support risk-appropriate, scalable oversight, and accelerate adoption of mNGS in clinical microbiology.
Lead-free perovskites nanocrystals (PNCs) have attracted significant attention as promising candidates for X-ray detection due to their high X-ray stopping power, remarkable radioluminescence light yield and favorable biocompatibility. However, the bulk and surface defects in the PNCs, formed during the purification or device fabrication process, may remarkably affect the charge transport properties and stability of the detectors. In this study, we discovered that the Cs3Cu2I5 PNCs are quite sensitive to the thermal annealing temperature, and a high temperature larger than 100 degrees C can trigger the decomposition of the PNCs and therefore the generation of bulk defects within them. By optimizing the annealing process, we are able to achieve the efficient solvent evaporation while maintaining the structure integrity of the PNCs. Additionally, a NaI assisted in situ surface passivation strategy was proposed to repair the surface defects caused by ligand detachment during the PNC purification process, further reducing the nonradiative recombination and suppressing the ion-migration effect. The resultant Cs3Cu2I5 PNC-organic bulk heterojunction nanocomposite X-ray detectors achieve a remarkable sensitivity of over 4000 mu CGyair -1cm-2 and a low detection limit of 30 nGyairs-1, alongside enhanced response speed and irradiation stability, positioning them among the best-performing lead-free perovskite film-based X-ray detectors reported to date.
