It’s the first rewrite of the federal critical technology list since 2024.
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Meet Zainab Nathani, the Illinois student who designed a material that can pull water from humid air using sunlight
Zainab Nathani, a high school junior from Niles, Illinois, has designed a material that can pull drinkable water straight out of humid air, powered entirely by sunlight. Studying at Niles Township West High School, she built her project around emulsion-templated composite biogels, porous, bio-based structures engineered to trap moisture from the atmosphere and release it as liquid water once warmed by natural sunlight, with no electricity or added energy required.
Dogs assess more than a person’s posture
Hugo worked it out before I did.
Synthetic Robot Training Data: The 40% Threshold Undercutting A BillionDollar Race
Research teams at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford independently found that vision-language-action robot policies trained on just 40% synthetic data matched the performance of policies trained on 100% real-world demonstrations. That result undercuts the assumption behind billions in robotics funding: that owning a massive real-world data collection fleet is the primary competitive moat.
Synthetic robot training data just cleared a bar that changes how robotics companies should be valued. Robots face a real data shortage: the physical world has produced only about 500,000 hours of high-quality robotic interaction data, while achieving baseline generalization in embodied AI is estimated to require between 1 billion and 10 billion hours, according to a 2026 industry analysis published via ANTARA. That gap is exactly why the CMU and Stanford finding matters.
Teams at CMU and Stanford independently reported 2026 results where vision-language-action models trained on 40% synthetic data matched policies trained on 100% real data on held-out tasks, according to the State of Robotics 2026 report from the Robotics Center of Silicon Valley. That finding runs against the scaling narrative borrowed from language models, where bigger and more real data has generally meant better performance. In robotics, synthetic robot training data closed most of that gap at less than half the real-world volume.
Long-range magnetic interactions govern how a ferrimagnet approaches its phase transition
Close to a phase transition, very different materials can follow the same mathematical rules. The concept of universality, which groups seemingly distinct systems based on their common properties, was developed to describe this phenomenon.
In magnetic systems, ferromagnets, ferrimagnets and antiferromagnets fall into the same universality class when short-range interactions dominate and their spatial and spin dimensionalities coincide. However, this universality has not been established when long-range interactions dominate.
In insulating magnets, long-range coupling may originate from dipole-dipole interactions. However, dipolar-driven mean-field criticality has only been firmly established in ferromagnets, leaving the ferrimagnetic and antiferromagnetic cases unexplored.
Krypton gas emerges as a new ingredient for quantum computing
To commercialize quantum computing, manufacturers need high-quality superconducting materials for microchips, but they also require a reliable, sustainable nanofabrication process. Tantalum is a corrosion-resistant metal that meets the first criterion but not the second. That’s because it has to be deposited on a substrate at temperatures that typically exceed 400°C (752°F)—too hot for many semiconductor foundries’ current tools.
Cornell researchers have developed a method that uses krypton gas to slash that deposition temperature to 200°C (392°F) while depositing tantalum on silicon, a standard high-quality substrate. The process resulted in thin films that also have substantially higher electronic conductivity.
“Tantalum as a material has been shown to be very exciting from a device performance perspective, but its manufacturability had some question marks because of integration challenges such as required process temperatures,” said Valla Fatemi, assistant professor and Aref and Manon Lahham Faculty Fellow in the Cornell Duffield College of Engineering, who led the project.