A patent-pending Purdue University method improves upon traditional ground-penetrating radar data to estimate the location, orientation and radius of underground utility pipes. This could decrease the risk of hazardous strikes during construction projects.

In the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, researchers addressed the challenge of balancing physical resolution and sensing distance in flexible capacitive dual-mode proximity-tactile sensor, a design inspired by the pupillary near reflex of the human eye.

The “Antscan” web platform is the world’s largest digital database of 3D insect data. It is the result of an international and interdisciplinary cooperation initiated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan. The project combines innovative 3D imaging, optimized data processing, and artificial intelligence (AI). The platform is freely accessible to researchers, teachers, and the interested public. Publication in the Nature Methods scientific journal. (DOI: 10.1038/s41592-026-03005-0).

To better understand how microplastics move through the body, researchers at Tokyo University of Science, Japan, have developed fluorescent nano-sized microplastics that can be tracked in real time using deep-tissue imaging. By loading common plastics with a fluorescent dye, they observed how particles of varying shapes and sizes travel through the digestive tract before being excreted in mice. These realistic microplastic models provide a powerful platform for studying their behavior and assessing potential health risks.

Researchers leveraged advanced technologies and artificial intelligence to hasten the process of generating 2,000 3D digital ant images. Now, a class of UMD computer science majors is working to bring the data to life.

Electrons can be ‘kicked across’ solar materials at almost the fastest speed nature allows, scientists have discovered – challenging long-held theories about how solar energy systems work. The finding could help researchers design more efficient ways of harvesting sunlight and converting it into electricity.

In experiments capturing events lasting just 18 femtoseconds – less than 20 quadrillionths of a second – researchers at the University of Cambridge observed charge separation happening within a single molecular vibration.

“We deliberately designed a system that, according to conventional theory, should not have transferred charge this fast,” said Dr Pratyush Ghosh, Research Fellow, at St John’s College, Cambridge, and first author of the study. “By conventional design rules, this system should have been slow and that’s what makes the result so striking.

“Instead of drifting randomly, the electron is launched in one coherent burst. The vibration acts like a molecular catapult. The vibrations don’t just accompany the process, they actively drive it.”

A femtosecond is one quadrillionth of a second – one second holds about eight times more femtoseconds than all the hours that have passed since the universe began. At that scale, atoms inside molecules are physically vibrating. 

The research, published in Nature Communications, challenges decades of design rules in solar energy research.

AI is transforming the way we do research. In a specially invited review, Tohoku University researchers examine how large AI models are revolutionizing catalyst discovery, accelerating the development of clean energy and sustainable technologies.

Distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing is an emerging technology that has been used for geophysical exploration, earthquake monitoring and structural health monitoring, etc., with continuous monitoring capability over long fiber spans. However, the technology still suffers from the trade-off between measurement speed and dynamic strain measurement range. Recently, researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) and Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María (Chile) have developed a frequency-comb spectrum-correlation reflectometry based distributed fiber-optic acoustic sensing technique, which achieves an order-of-magnitude improvement in frequency response over the state-of-the-art fast frequency scanning methods, meanwhile it achieves more than tenfold enhancement in dynamic strain measurement range in comparison with the existing phase-demodulated systems. This breakthrough represents a new paradigm for distributed fiber-optic sensing and will meet the urgent demands across a wide range of industrial fields.