Over a decade ago, WHO introduced the ASSURED (Affordable, Sensitive, Specific, User-friendly, Rapid and Robust, Equipment-free, and Deliverable to end-users) criteria to guide diagnostic assay development. Today, lateral flow assays (LFAs) best meet these standards, evolving from simple rapid tests to advanced diagnostics integrating AI and nanotechnology for precise, quantitative results. Notably, nanoparticle-enhanced LFAs have achieved limits of detection (LOD) as low as 0.01 pg/mL (a 100-fold improvement over conventional methods), while AI algorithms have reduced interpretation errors by 40% in low-contrast conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the societal impact of LFAs, with over 3 billion antigen tests deployed globally, demonstrating 98% specificity in real-world surveillance. Beyond infectious diseases, LFAs are revolutionizing cancer screening through liquid biopsy, achieving a 92% concordance rate with gold-standard assays, food safety and environmental monitoring. Despite these advancements, challenges remain in scalability, reproducibility, sustainable manufacturing, and how to enhance the sensitivities and lower the LOD. However, innovations in biodegradable materials, roll-to-roll printing, CRISPR-integrated multiplexing, and efficient functionalization methods like photochemical immobilization technique offer promising solutions, with projected further cost reductions and scalability. This review highlights the technological evolution, diverse applications, and future trajectories of LFAs, highlighting their critical role in democratizing diagnostics.

In this work, we present an experimental study on the acoustic vibrations of ZnO nanoparticles array with different concentration of Ga dopings by using femtosecond pump-probe technique. The Ga-doped ZnO (GZO) nano-triangle particles with the sizes of 190, 232 and 348 nm are fabricated by nanosphere lithography and pulsed laser deposition method. The result indicates that the frequency of acoustic vibrations of GZO nanoparticles decrease as the Ga-concentration is increased. Importantly, the vibration period of the GZO nanoparticles at the same Ga doping concentration show a nonlinear increase as the nanoparticle size is increased, which is different from the common linear dependency in undoped ZnO nanoparticles. It may be attributed to the crystal structure distortion and elastic characteristics variation due to Ga doping, and the elastic modulus at 7.3% Ga doping is decreased by 30%–60% for GZO nanoparticles with different sizes. The study can be very helpful for evaluating the crystal structure distortion and elastic characteristics of doped nano-materials with optical methods. Besides, it can offer a complementary method of thermal management in ZnO based optoelectronic devices.

We theoretically demonstrate the control of the polarization direction of isolated attosecond pulses (IAPs) with inhomogeneous two-color fields synthesized by an 800-nm fundamental pulse and a 2000-nm control pulse having crossed linear polarizations. The results show that by using the temporally and spatially shaped field, the high-order harmonic generation (HHG) process can be efficiently controlled. An ultra-broad supercontinuum ranging from 150th to 400th harmonics which covers the water window region is generated. Such a supercontinuum supports the generation of a 64-as linearly polarized IAP, whose polarization direction is at about 45° with respect to the x axis. Moreover, we analyze the influence of the inhomogeneity parameters and the relative angle of the fundamental and control pulses on the IAP generation. It is shown that the polarization direction of the IAP can rotate in a wide range approximately from 8° to 90° relative to the x axis when the inhomogeneity parameters and the relative angle vary.

Malaria remains a major global health challenge, particularly in low-resource settings where diagnostic infrastructure is limited. The gold standard diagnostic is manual light microscopy which is slow, labor-intensive, and dependent on expert interpretation limiting the management of malaria. Here, we present a magneto-optical (MO) imaging approach that exploits the magnetic anisotropy and optical dichroism of hemozoin crystals to achieve label-free, quantitative detection of malaria infection within a conventional polarizing microscope. In our implementation, an external magnetic field induces torque on the paramagnetic hemozoin crystals, aligning their long axes along the field vector. This alignment modulates the optical anisotropy of the specimen, producing a measurable field-dependent change in transmitted polarization contrast. Unlike previously reported standalone magneto-optical devices, which rely on bulk optical scattering or transmission modulation, our approach integrates MO directly into a conventional polarizing microscope setup, allowing simultaneous imaging and quantitative MO signal analysis at the microscopic scale. By integrating ratiometric intensity analysis and threshold-based segmentation metrics, we advance malaria imaging beyond purely observational assessment, enabling a quantitative correlation between MO signal strength and hemozoin concentration, and thus, with parasite developmental stage. These metrics are also well-suited for automated malaria diagnostics, as they provide stable, objective parameters that can be reliably computed without expert intervention. Moreover, because microscopy expertise is already well established in many malaria-endemic regions, embedding this approach within the familiar framework of microscopy offers a practical and rapid pathway for integrating the technique into routine malaria diagnosis.