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A university president outlines six principles meant to help institutions resist political pressure on research funding, peer review and academic autonomy, citing examples from the United States and Hungary. The piece traces how funding cuts, shifting grant priorities and legal campaigns against institutions like Central European University have already eroded independent scholarship in some countries.
Engineers at Delft University of Technology built a lightweight whisker sensor system that lets tiny drones under 100 grams navigate by physical contact rather than cameras or LiDAR. Two whiskers mounted at the front connect to miniature pressure sensors that detect surface contact, letting the drone estimate depth, avoid obstacles, and map its surroundings using just 34KB of software.
Engineering students from Eindhoven University of Technology have built the Stella Juva, a solar-powered electric ambulance designed after consultations with African health NGOs to serve remote Kenyan communities. The vehicle carries an ultrasound scanner, X-ray equipment, a defibrillator and a refrigerator for vaccines, functioning as a mobile clinic rather than just transport, and is now undergoing real-world trials in select Kenyan communities.
Academics led by Eindhoven University's Pavlo Bazilinskyy are hosting an industry workshop this week focused on deterring passengers from having sex in autonomous vehicles, which lack a human driver to enforce norms. The team, drawing from systems engineering, psychology and tourism studies, is using the topic to explore broader questions about behavior and design in shared robotaxi spaces.
Stanford scientists genetically engineered mice lacking a functioning cortex, then implanted human neurons derived from reprogrammed skin cells into the empty space. The transplanted cells multiplied from a few hundred to several million and wired themselves into the mouse brain, with the animals behaving largely normally despite the human tissue making up nearly half their brain volume by some measures. The findings were published in Nature.
Researchers at Maynooth University in Ireland built a molecular computer called a Scaffolded DNA Computer, using DNA origami to fold long and short DNA strands into a computing grid. Instead of transistors and electricity, the system relies on DNA base pairs binding and unbinding as they settle into their most stable configuration, which represents the solved answer to a preprogrammed calculation. The team ran 10 different programs on the device, including operations involving 100-bit computations, marking it as one of the most complex molecular computers built so far.
A new report titled 'Pacing the Frontier' argues that despite widespread agreement among AI leaders that development may need to slow down, there is no clear technical or policy framework for how to actually do it. Coauthor Raymond Douglas of the University of Toronto says the field needs to treat slowdown as an unsolved research problem rather than a vague aspiration, especially as fears grow over AI systems being used to build even more powerful successors.
A team of three mathematicians has finally proven the 2004 'sandwich conjecture,' which claims that any sufficiently large graph of interest can be mathematically bounded above and below by two simpler, well-understood random graphs. The proof, completed in 2025, resolves a two-decade-old open problem in graph theory by pushing existing mathematical techniques to their limits.
Ning Xu, an optical engineer at Tsinghua University in Beijing, won Nikon's 2023 Small World in Motion competition with a super-resolution video capturing the abnormal beating of airway cilia in a child with primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). His entry topped 346 submissions from 40 countries in the contest, which is a video-focused offshoot of Nikon's long-running Small World Photomicrography Competition.
Cornell University scientists created a process called Direct Electrode-to-Electrode Regeneration (DEER) that revives worn EV battery electrodes by chemically stripping excess solid electrolyte interphase buildup rather than shredding cells into raw materials. Treated electrodes recovered up to 95% of original capacity and degraded more slowly than untreated batteries, and a second treatment round restored capacity to 90% even after prior regeneration.
Swedish startup Scaleout Systems, born from Uppsala University research in 2018, has shifted its machine learning work from commercial vehicles toward military applications following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The company now builds compact computer vision models that run directly on drones, pilot tablets, and field command hardware to detect and select targets, and has joined NATO's DIANA accelerator program for a project called Federated Aerial Intelligence for Recon.
In a conversation, software pioneer Ray Ozzie described his early exposure to computing at a high school with ARPA-funded terminals and later at the University of Illinois, where daytime coursework meant punch cards but nighttime access to the PLATO system revealed a thriving online community with chat, messaging, and forums decades before the modern internet. He credits this early, informal exposure to networked computing with shaping his later work on collaborative software.