MATLAB

A researcher with nearly twenty years of Matlab experience says they have finally managed to write a cellfun call entirely from memory, without consulting the documentation. The milestone was shared with a mix of celebration and self-deprecating humour, striking a chord with fellow programmers who know how notoriously hard Matlab's function syntax is to remember.

Researchers have released LIBquiv, an open-source MATLAB tool that brings physics-based modeling into equivalent circuit models for lithium-ion batteries. By coupling electrochemical detail with the circuit models engineers already use, the tool aims to improve battery simulation accuracy for applications such as electric vehicles and energy storage, while remaining freely available to the research community.

A new open-source MATLAB toolkit has been released that applies derivative-free optimization methods to experimental design. Derivative-free methods are useful when objective functions are noisy, expensive, or lack analytic gradients, which is common in laboratory and engineering experiments. The toolkit lets researchers embed optimization directly into experiment planning workflows without needing licenses for commercial tools, and it has drawn attention in the scientific software community.