We all know what LEGO is—it is a timeless, fun and educational toy for a kid, one he or she played with as a child, and now probably steps on when walking around the house as a parent. But the charm of LEGO knows no bounds. In fact, more and more adults nowadays show an increased interest in tinkering with these brightly hued bricks.

High energy batteries, in cell phones and laptops, can blow up in your face. Research around that problem surfaced with a solution from a surprisingly different field. It is a soluble polymer used in skin cream that can also stabilise battery output. Soon, putting a phone on your cheek will be as gentle on your skin as moisturizer.

You get lost on a mountain and your cell phone battery goes flat. How do you get help? You help yourself by walking, wearing a featherweight biomechanical device which harvests energy from the movement of your body. CUHK Professor Wei Hsin Liao explains how a moving knee can generate electricity.

There is a new way to deploy the right microrobotic swarm into a bodily fluid to fight illness. A research group of the Faculty of Engineering has categorised magnetic swarming microrobots and devised ways to select the one that navigates best in a bio-fluid, taking treatment into the vascular system and other confined regions of the body.

10,000 times faster, 98% cheaper and better quality, a revolution in nanoscale 3D printing technology comes from the Faculty of Engineering Professor Shih Chi Chen and his team with FP-TPL. It prints layer-by-layer not point-by-point, greatly improves resolution, and heralds a new era for biomedical and nanotechnology.