What do wind turbines, EV batteries, military equipment and your smartphone have in common? Probably more than you think. To be manufactured, these products require critical minerals that are found beneath our feet. But gaining access to these minerals, which are crucial and in high demand worldwide, is not a simple process. Currently, the United States relies heavily on importing these materials, which can be delayed for various reasons. As a result, finding domestic sources of critical minerals is a priority. But finding new sources of critical minerals can take years of drilling, sample collection and laboratory testing before geologists know whether a site contains sufficient deposits to merit development. Researchers at Texas A&M University are working to change that. 

Fridges, A/C systems, and datacenters consume enormous amounts of electricity and the cooling demand is constantly on the rise. A team of research from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University of Tsukuba in Japan is now presenting a new approach substantiated by a prototype where heat assumes the role formerly taken by an electric motor. Two ultra-thin shape-memory films interact to convert thermal energy into mechanical work in a first step and finally into measurable cold. Their work opens up new possibilities for the future use of waste heat and solar energy for solid-state cooling. The results have been published in Nature Energy. (DOI: 10.1038/s41560-026-02122-6)

Researchers have created teardrop-shaped soft robots that leap upward or forward when exposed to infrared light – and will keep jumping as long as the light is present. The work demonstrates a new mechanism for self-resetting jumping behavior in soft robotics.

A review from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications organizes optical convolution computing into two approaches: definition-based and theorem-based methods. It highlights applications in signal processing, image analysis, and high-dimensional data processing, while identifying challenges such as energy efficiency, scalability, stability, and complete Convolutional Neural Network support. The review also emphasizes hybrid opto-electronic systems as a practical path toward deployable optical computing hardware. 

By combining two complementary clues—camera geometry and visual appearance—researchers at Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, developed a new approach for preserving identities across multiple cameras. The method uses epipolar geometry to identify spatially consistent candidate matches and appearance similarity to distinguish between possible identities. The approach can be integrated with existing single-camera tracking systems without requiring environment-specific retraining.

 

Modern computers keep processing and memory in separate locations, so transferring data between them costs time and energy. This limitation is becoming increasingly apparent as artificial intelligence grows. The brain works differently: memory and computation are closely intertwined, and information is carried by the timing of short pulses, or spikes. The aim of neuromorphic engineering is to borrow this design, and light is an appealing medium for doing so, because it offers high speed, natural parallelism, and low energy consumption.

By harnessing the properties of gallium nitride, EPFL engineers have built a tiny transistor that can handle very high voltage with minimal energy loss, a key requirement for AI data centers, electric vehicles, and solar power systems.

Rock weathering, the breakdown and dissolving of rocks and minerals caused by their exposure to water, air, and biological life, is a major regulator of Earth’s atmospheric CO₂ levels and climate. Scientists have asked if rock weathering could be accelerated to pull excess CO₂ out of the atmosphere. However, current efforts to achieve this are still too slow to affect the global carbon balance or to be economically viable at industrial scale.

Now, researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Harvard Medical School (HMS)’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, engineered a solution to this problem. They showed in customized bioreactors with a continuous flow of seawater that an engineered marine bacterium sped up the weathering of a silicate mineral, boosting the amount of CO₂that was removed from air. Their findings are published in Nature Biotechnology.

 Scientists at the University of Plymouth and the British Antarctic Survey investigated how shifts in ocean salinity could affect marine species in the Antarctic