ITU’s Facts and Figures 2025 shows steady progress in connectivity, while highlighting gaps in quality and affordability

Conventional borehole backfilling suffers from various technical limitations, making infrastructure demolition and renewal difficult. In an innovative development, researchers from Shibaura Institute of Technology have proposed a novel circulating mixing method that pumps backfill material from the bottom of boreholes with unprecedented uniformity throughout the entire depth. This technology can revolutionize urban construction and renewal projects, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

Addressing the urgent demand for clean energy, Japanese researchers utilized a single-step solution plasma process to synthesize high-performing, cost-effective, bifunctional catalysts for metal–air batteries. Their cobalt-tin hydroxide/carbon composites rival traditional platinum- and ruthenium-based materials in both performance and long-term stability. This breakthrough significantly lowers manufacturing costs and enhances the scalability of next-generation batteries, poised to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels.

By fusing enzyme fragments to antibodies, researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, developed an innovative enzyme switch “Switchbody,” which is activated when bound to its target antigen. Switchbody is based on a trap-and-release of enzyme fragment that dynamically controls enzyme activity, offering new opportunities in diagnostics, therapeutics, and precision bioprocessing.

The oceans have to play a role in helping humanity remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to curb dangerous climate warming. But are we ready to scale up the technologies that will do the job?

Skyrmions are three-dimensional, nontrivial topological textures that have attracted extensive attention in magnetism, condensed matter physics, and beyond due to their unique stability and rich physical implications. In recent years, researchers have succeeded in creating optical skyrmions, using light’s polarization and orbital angular momentum (OAM) to generate complex polarization topologies in the spatial domain. However, so far all optical skyrmions have been confined to the spatial domain, driven by longitudinal OAM to form twisted “helical tubes” along the propagation direction. This raises a natural question: can we break this limitation and bring skyrmions into spatiotemporal domain?

Recently, the team led by Prof. Qiwen Zhan at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology has, for the first time, proposed and experimentally demonstrated a novel optical spatiotemporal skyrmion. By employing vectorial sculpturing of picosecond pulse wave packets, the researchers combined two orthogonally polarized beams—spatiotemporal Gaussian pulses and spatiotemporal vortex pulses—to generate a spatiotemporal topological structure covering the full set of polarization states: the spatiotemporal skyrmion.

The work, entitled “Construction of Optical Spatiotemporal Skyrmions”, is published in Light: Science & Applications. This breakthrough extends the topological concept of optical skyrmions from the spatial domain to the spatiotemporal domain, opening new directions for structured light and topological optics research.