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Saltwater sensor turns touch into electrical signals like skin, with prosthetic potential

You pick up a fragile glass from the table. Without thinking about it, you feel its surface against your fingertips and continuously adjust your grip. You hold it firmly enough to keep it from slipping out of your hand, but not so tightly that it breaks.

For you, this is a simple maneuver. But beneath the skin, you set off a sophisticated interplay of processes. The pressure from your fingertips opens tiny gates in the skin’s sensory cells, allowing electrically charged atoms to flow in. This shifts the electrical balance and triggers a nerve signal that travels toward the brain. There, the signal becomes part of the information that allows you to feel the touch and continuously adjust your grip.

Clever.

Self-powered artificial synapse combines sensing and memory in flexible electronics

Neuromorphic devices, which are designed to emulate aspects of biological neural networks, are promising candidates for low-power, intelligent sensing technologies, including wearable applications.

Among the architectures explored for neuromorphic computing, graphene-channel ion-gel-gated transistors (g-IGTs) are attractive because of their electronic properties, flexibility, low-voltage operation and ability to modulate synaptic weights to mimic biological synapses. However, most current g-IGTs still rely on external power supplies, limiting their practical use in wearable neuromorphic systems.

To address this challenge, a research team led by professor Sejoon Lee of the Department of System Semiconductor at Dongguk University in South Korea has developed a battery-free, self-powered, flexible g-IGT device driven by a triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG). TENGs convert mechanical stimuli, such as body movement, touch or vibration, into electrical signals.

Pressurized wind tunnel experiments could help wind farms generate more power

The world needs more wind energy. But anyone designing new wind turbines or trying to squeeze more power out of existing ones faces a stiff challenge when testing new approaches. That’s because the atmosphere is a tough place for a controlled experiment.

Some researchers use wind tunnels to conduct tests, but tests of scaled-down wind turbines in traditional wind tunnels can differ widely from field conditions. (Wind turbines are the largest rotating machines ever made.) The problem hampers not only the development of better wind turbines but also our understanding of basic questions like how much power to expect from a turbine when winds change direction.

In a new open-access paper published in PNAS Nexus, researchers closed the gap between experiments in the field and the lab by using a highly pressurized wind tunnel to simulate the flow physics of the atmosphere. With this approach, the researchers determined how the turbine’s alignment and its tip speed relative to the wind influence the power it generates, offering new insights into how to get more power from existing wind farms.

Misleading AI-generated summaries can distort human memory

AI-generated summaries are becoming increasingly prevalent—from news article previews to workplace meeting transcriptions to high-stakes settings like police body camera footage—despite studies showing that AI can generate misleading or inaccurate information.

A new study from a team of researchers at Georgetown University and the University of Washington suggests that when prompted to summarize a video, AI systems that produce incorrect information can manipulate people’s memory and perceptions of truth.

The study, “AI-Enabled Human Memory Manipulation: Misleading AI-Generated Summaries Distort Human Memory,” was published on the preprint server arXiv and will be presented at the Ninth AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics and Society (AIES), taking place in October 2026.

Brain Differences May Explain Why Some Children Struggle at Math

Differences in brain activity are linked to difficulties using and adapting math problem-solving strategies in children with developmental dyscalculia.

Choosing how to tackle a math problem can be a challenge of its own for children with developmental dyscalculia, a condition marked by persistent difficulty with math problem-solving.

A Stanford University study connects these struggles with differences in brain activity, offering clues to the processes behind a condition that remains poorly understood.

Researchers Borrow Chipmaking Technology To Build Better EV Batteries

Researchers used nanoscale manufacturing techniques from the semiconductor industry to design a copper current collector that helps lithium build up evenly during battery charging.

Electric vehicles could travel farther on a single charge if their batteries could store more energy without getting bigger or heavier. A promising alternative, known as an anode-free battery, eliminates materials such as graphite that normally store lithium during charging, saving weight and space.

Lithium instead deposits directly onto thin copper foil, where repeated charging and discharging can cause it to build up unevenly into sharp, branching spikes called dendrites. The protective layer over the lithium also becomes unstable, reducing battery performance and shortening its lifespan.

Scientists Capture a Fundamental Energy-Transfer Reaction in Remarkable Detail

Researchers captured how a molecule and its surrounding water reorganize together during a rapid energy-transfer reaction that plays a key role in nature.

A chemical process central to photosynthesis, metabolism, and other forms of energy conversion has now been captured in unusual detail, revealing how a molecule and the water around it change together as a proton and electron are transferred.

Using two complementary ultrafast X-ray techniques, researchers tracked changes inside a light-activated molecule while observing how the surrounding network of water molecules reorganized. Combined with advanced computer simulations, the measurements showed how gaining a proton reshaped the molecule’s electronic structure at specific sites while altering its surrounding environment.

Scientists Just Built the World’s Most Accurate Clock

Lutetium clocks have achieved record accuracy and comparison precision, making them promising candidates for future time standards and measurements of gravity.

An atomic clock built from the element lutetium at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT) at the National University of Singapore (NUS) has set a new benchmark for timekeeping accuracy. Results published in Nature on show that the clock measured its transition frequency to 19 decimal places, yielding an uncertainty of 1 × 10⁻¹⁹, the lowest reported for any optical atomic clock to date.

“I am confident that what we have now is the most accurate clock in the world,” says team leader Murray Barrett, a CQT Principal Investigator and Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the National University of Singapore.

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