Research from The University of Osaka highlights a new model of a gyroscopic wave energy converter. The device was shown to be capable of absorbing up to half of incoming wave energy across a wide range of frequencies, meaning it could achieve the theoretical maximum efficiency. These results provide important design insights for more efficient and adaptable wave energy technologies.

The race to develop a virtual scientist — an AI creation that conducts every stage of research, from idea to publication — has consumed researchers, start-up founders, and tech juggernauts alike.

It has also illuminated fundamental philosophical questions about the process of doing science. Is the scientific method really the best approach to learning about the world?

A new paper in Collective Intelligence applies the scientific method to itself, finding that some common strategies that scientists consider gold standards for designing experiments perform worse than random choice. In other words: random exploration may produce better theories than carefully-planned experiments.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a six-year, nearly $2 million grant to The University of Texas at Arlington to provide scholarships for qualified undergraduate mathematics students.

Loneliness has a critical impact on the mental health of citizens, particularly among the elderly. Robots capable of perceiving and responding to human emotions can serve as heart-warming companions to help lift the spirits. A research team at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) has discovered that the combined power of music and empathetic speech in robots with artificial intelligence (AI) could foster a stronger bond between humans and machines. These findings underscore the importance of a multimodal approach in designing empathetic robots, offering significant implications for their application in health support, elder care, education and beyond.

In a must-see topical lecture called “From Discovery to Impact: A Framework for Research That Strengthens Communities,” Morton draws on Arizona State University’s pioneering model of use-inspired research — where excellence is measured by the overall economic, social, cultural, and overall health of the communities ASU serves.

A high-level scientific panel moderated by the Financial Times titled: “How the human exposome will unlock better health and medicine”, gathers three leaders of the Global Exposome Forum from the United States and Europe, to brief delegates from the global scientific community on progress made since its launch in Washington D.C. in May, 2025.

Researchers at QuTech in Delft, The Netherlands, have developed a new chip architecture that could make it easier to test and scale up quantum processors based on semiconductor spin qubits. The platform, called QARPET (Qubit-Array Research Platform for Engineering and Testing) and reported in Nature Electronics, allows hundreds of qubits to be characterized within the same test-chip under the same operating conditions used in quantum computing experiments. "With such a complex, tightly packed quantum chip, things really starts to resemble the traditional semiconductor industry." states researcher Giordano Scappucci.

Recent experiments on twisted MoTe₂ have observed the fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect in the absence of an external magnetic field. Now, a theoretical study employing a real-space lattice model and precision many-body calculations presents a comprehensive ground-state phase diagram and elucidates the finite-temperature and dynamical behaviors of the system. The work reveals competing phases, including fractional Chern insulators and quantum anomalous Hall crystals, and identifies experimentally testable energy scales.