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A soft smart bandage is capable of multiplexed metabolic monitoring, antimicrobial treatment, and electrical stimulation. 

Abstract Background Diabetic foot ulcers (DFUs) account for the majority of all limb amputations and hospitalizations due to diabetes complications. With 30 million cases of diabetes in the USA and 500,000 new diagnoses each year, DFUs are a growing health problem. Diabetes patients with limb amputations have high postoperative mortality, a high rate of secondary amputation, prolonged inpatient hospital stays, and a high incidence of re-hospitalization. DFU-associated amputations constitute a significant burden on healthcare resources that cost more than 10 billion dollars per year. Currently, there is no way to identify wounds that will heal versus those that will become severely infected and require amputation. Main body Accurate identification of causative pathogens in diabetic foot ulcers is a critical component of effective treatment. Compared to traditional culture-based methods, advanced sequencing technologies provide more comprehensive and unbiased profiling on wound microbiome with a higher taxonomic resolution, as well as functional annotation such as virulence and antibiotic resistance. In this review, we summarize the latest developments in defining the microbiology of diabetic foot ulcers that have been unveiled by sequencing technologies and discuss both the future promises and current limitations of these approaches. In particular, we highlight the temporal patterns and system dynamics in the diabetic foot microbiome monitored and measured during wound progression and medical intervention, and explore the feasibility of molecular diagnostics in clinics. Conclusion Molecular tests conducted during weekly office visits to clean and examine DFUs would allow clinicians to offer personalized treatment and antibiotic therapy. Personalized wound management could reduce healthcare costs, improve quality of life for patients, and recoup lost productivity that is important not only to the patient, but also to healthcare payers and providers. These efforts could also improve antibiotic stewardship and control the rise of “superbugs” vital to global health. 

Abstract PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) is ESA’s M3 mission designed to detect and characterise extrasolar planets and perform asteroseismic monitoring of a large number of stars. PLATO will detect small planets (down to <2R$$_\textrm{Earth}$$ $_{\text{Earth}}^{}$) around bright stars (<11 mag), including terrestrial planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars. With the complement of radial velocity observations from the ground, planets will be characterised for their radius, mass, and age with high accuracy (5%, 10%, 10% for an Earth-Sun combination respectively). PLATO will provide us with a large-scale catalogue of well-characterised small planets up to intermediate orbital periods, relevant for a meaningful comparison to planet formation theories and to better understand planet evolution. It will make possible comparative exoplanetology to place our Solar System planets in a broader context. In parallel, PLATO will study (host) stars using asteroseismology, allowing us to determine the stellar properties with high accuracy, substantially enhancing our knowledge of stellar structure and evolution. The payload instrument consists of 26 cameras with 12cm aperture each. For at least four years, the mission will perform high-precision photometric measurements. Here we review the science objectives, present PLATO‘s target samples and fields, provide an overview of expected core science performance as well as a description of the instrument and the mission profile towards the end of the serial production of the flight cameras. PLATO is scheduled for a launch date end 2026. This overview therefore provides a summary of the mission to the community in preparation of the upcoming operational phases. 

Understanding the nucleon spin structure in the regime where the strong interaction becomes truly strong poses a challenge to both experiment and theory. At energy scales below the nucleon mass of about 1 GeV, the intense interaction among the quarks and gluons inside the nucleon makes them highly correlated. Their coherent behaviour causes the emergence of effective degrees of freedom, requiring the application of non-perturbative techniques such as chiral effective field theory. Here we present measurements of the neutron’s generalized spin polarizabilities that quantify the neutron’s spin precession under electromagnetic fields at very low energy-momentum transfer squared down to 0.035 GeV2. In this regime, chiral effective field theory calculations are expected to be applicable. Our data, however, show a strong discrepancy with these predictions, presenting a challenge to the current description of the neutron’s spin properties.