SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, is celebrating the inaugural Biophotonics Discovery's Impact of the Year Award as well as its first recipient, Stanford University Associate Professor of materials science and engineering, Guosong Hong. Hong was officially honored at the Biophotonics Focus: Light-Based Technologies for Reproductive, Maternal, and Neonatal Health plenary during SPIE Photonics West on Sunday evening.

A paper published in Nature Communications shows how AI at Sandia National Laboratories is advancing beyond a mere automation tool toward becoming a powerful engine for clear, comprehensible scientific discovery.

A joint research team from NIMS and University of Tsukuba developed "autonomous AI network" technology by which multiple autonomous AI systems can efficiently discover new materials by spontaneously collaborating with each other and forming a network. The team demonstrated the effectiveness of the technology through simulations. This research result was published in npj Computational Materials on December 9, 2025.

One of the primary challenges with prosthetic hands is the ability to properly tune the appropriate grip based on the object being handled. In Nanotechnology and Precision Engineering, researchers in China have developed an object identification system for prosthetic hands to guide appropriate grip strength decisions in real time. Their system uses an electromyography sensor at the user’s forearm to determine what the user intends to do with the object at hand.

The presence of small plastic pellets on the beaches of Donostia and Orio has drawn attention to a little-studied source of pollution: leakage of industrial microplastics that reach the sea through stormwater drainage networks. Researchers in the Materials + Technologies Group at the EHU have identified two control parameters that would enable early detection of these losses to be made, and have proposed containment measures that can be easily incorporated into discharge regulations.  

The scale-up of rhamnolipid production using waste glycerol was successfully demonstrated under a constant impeller tip speed, increasing yield by ~22% without compromising cell viability or product quality.

Both 3D and 0D rare-earth perovskites with high crystal structural rigidity are demonstrated as high-temperature scintillators, showing the X-ray imaging technique used in extreme environments.