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AI and ultralow-energy lasers enable an ultrafast authentication system

The security of modern communications heavily relies on systems that can rapidly and reliably verify users and the devices they are using. This process, known as authentication, essentially entails confirming that users or devices are legitimate (i.e., who or what they claim to be).

Conventional authentication systems rely on static cryptographic keys, fixed digital keys that allow encryption algorithms to scramble readable data into unreadable texts or vice versa. While these systems perform well in some contexts, they often struggle when networks include billions of devices that continuously connect and disconnect.

Researchers at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) recently developed a new system that could authenticate devices faster and more reliably in real time, even when they are connecting to large-scale networks, cloud services or virtual environments.

Quantum computing could transform energy grid optimization and security

Modern power systems are rapidly evolving into highly digitized smart grids, increasing their complexity at an unprecedented pace. Renewables, batteries, electric vehicles, power electronics, sensors and real-time control systems are all expanding rapidly, and this is making electricity grids significantly harder to simulate, optimize, secure and operate.

This is driven by the increasing energy demands of a tech-driven modern world. Think of a suburban street in 2005—every house pulled electricity from the grid, and power flowed in one direction from big power stations.

This same street in 2026 might have houses with rooftop solar exporting power back into the grid; electric vehicles (EVs) that need to charge overnight; home batteries storing solar energy and feeding it back into the grid when prices spike; electric busses, electric irrigation pumps, automated machinery and smart appliances that turn on and off based on grid signals.

A stair-climbing robot that catches itself when it falls

SUTD researchers have developed a reinforcement-learning-based safety system that teaches a stair-traversing service robot to brace itself mid-fall, addressing one of the biggest barriers to deploying autonomous robots on staircases.

Staircases are among the most challenging terrains a mobile robot can face. A multi-year field study found that robots designed for stair traversal fail at least 35 times more often on stairs than on level ground. The consequences can be significant. A robot that loses balance on a step accumulates momentum as it tumbles, threatening severe damage to itself, the building, and anyone in its path.

The paper is published in the journal Results in Engineering.

Misbehaving chatbots could be kept in check with personality tests

Artificial intelligence chatbots need to work on their social judgment, recent events suggest. At one end of the spectrum, they’re facing lawsuits for recommending dangerous actions. At the other end, the models can be so nice they’re considered sycophantic.

The problem could get worse as AI bots work more with humans, such as handling customer complaints, says Yan Leng, assistant professor of information, risk, and operations management at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

But help may be on the way. In new research, Leng has devised a sort of personality test—more precisely, a behavioral audit —for large language models (LLMs), the technology that drives products such as ChatGPT. The paper is published in the journal Information Systems Research.

Webb reveals black hole that formed before its galaxy

Which comes first, the galaxy or the black hole? We don’t know, but scientists have long thought it could be the galaxy: Large stars within an existing galaxy consume their fuel and collapse to form black holes, which can gobble up surrounding material and merge over time to form more massive entities.

But it’s hard to figure out how black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun, thousands of which have now been detected in the early universe, could have grown so quickly from such small seeds.

Now, researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have detected clear evidence that some supermassive black holes were enormous from the beginning, forming without a stellar collapse phase, and without a significantly more massive host galaxy to feed them.

Freeze-dried reagents and hand-powered hardware bring biomanufacturing to remote labs

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, working with collaborators around the world, have demonstrated the effectiveness of a suite of low-cost, portable biotechnology tools designed to improve access to laboratory research and diagnostics in resource-limited settings.

Published in Science Advances, the study highlights how decentralized biomanufacturing tools and freeze-dried reagents can help researchers produce high-value biological materials locally—reducing reliance on fragile international supply chains and expanding access to life sciences innovation globally.

The research was led by Keith Pardee, associate professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, alongside collaborators including Camila González in Bogotá, Colombia, Fernán Federici in Santiago, Chile, and Lindomar Pena in Recife, Brazil.

‘Atom Camera’ maps laser light at nanoscale using a single ultracold atom

A research group led by Assistant Professor Takafumi Tomita and Professor Kenji Ohmori at the Institute for Molecular Science, National Institutes of Natural Sciences, has developed a new microscopy technique called the Atom Camera, which uses a single ultracold atom at near absolute zero temperature trapped in an optical tweezer as a camera to visualize the intensity and polarization distributions of light at the nanometer (one-millionth of a millimeter) scale.

In this study, a single atom trapped by optical tweezer was successfully utilized as a scanning probe for imaging the fine structures of intensity and polarization distributions of light patterns with a spatial resolution beyond the diffraction limit of conventional optical microscopes. The results are published in Nature Communications.

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