Research, experimentation, training, as well as market access remain all too often disconnected in the building envelope sector, slowing the development and adoption of innovative, sustainable, and circular solutions. For companies, designers, and industry professionals, identifying the right expertise, infrastructure, and services throughout the innovation process is often complex, fragmented, and difficult to access.

The Building Envelope Alliance (BEA) was created to address this need. The new European network brings together research institutions, universities, and innovation accelerators. With complementary expertise and infrastructure, the Alliance aims to provide an integrated point of access to consulting services, testing, performance validation, specialized training, and technology transfer while supporting the development of building envelope solutions from the initial stages of research and concept validation through to market entry.

Researchers have built the first photonic computing chip that simultaneously exploits 32 wavelengths, 3 spatial modes, and 2 polarizations—192 parallel channels in total. The chip supports dynamically reconfigurable convolution kernels up to 13×13, enabling multi‑scale feature extraction and structured noise suppression. It achieves an experimental throughput of 15.36 TOPS, paving the way for high‑precision optical AI in computer vision and biomedical imaging.

As humanity enters the era of long‑term crewed deep‑space exploration, understanding the brain’s adaptive mechanisms to extreme environments such as microgravity and radiation has become a critical issue in space medicine. Previous studies using magnetic resonance imaging have revealed structural brain plasticity after spaceflight, including ventricular expansion and changes in grey matter volume. However, knowledge of dynamic changes at the neurophysiological level remains limited, and most existing evidence comes from group‑level analyses of long‑duration missions (e.g., six months), leaving the specific neurofunctional impact of short‑duration missions on individuals unclear. Conventional neuroimaging equipment is bulky and cannot be used in orbit. In contrast, electroencephalography (EEG) is portable, low‑cost, and repeatable, and has shown sensitivity in neurological conditions such as concussion, but its application in the extreme spaceflight environment has not been reported. Therefore, validating the feasibility of portable EEG technology for monitoring individual brain function before and after short‑duration spaceflight holds significant practical value for building future in‑orbit brain health assessment systems in deep‑space exploration.

The AI-based program AlphaFold predicts a protein’s 3D structure with remarkable accuracy. However, it tends to reduce heterogeneous structures to a single dominant conformation, or shape, and overlooks experimental conditions that can alter local structure. Researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators have now developed a way to guide AlphaFold with experimental data. Their approach, published in Nature Biotechnology, paves the way for improved future predictive models.

Proteins are responsible for most functions in the human body. However, their analysis, which is essential for understanding diseases, developing drugs, and discovering new biomarkers, remains highly complex. Using a technology called “nanopore detection”, a team at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has developed a rapid and efficient method for identifying proteins, molecule by molecule. These findings, published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, pave the way for faster diagnostics.

The number of plant species in many ecosystems in Europe has grown rather than shrunk over the last 100 years. However, this is not necessarily cause for celebration as this local increase is primarily due to generalists and non-native species, which compete with the original native species. Moreover, the overall number of species has not increased across Europe. These were the findings of an international research team led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU). In its latest study, published in the scientific journal “Nature Communications”, the team analysed more than 57,000 time series of plant biodiversity across various habitats in Europe.

Scientists from NTU Singapore and Waseda University have developed a flexible “diving suit” for cyborg cockroaches, enabling the insects to survive, and move underwater and in low-oxygen environments for up to three hours. Published today in Nature Communications, the study could expand the use of cyborg insects in search-and-rescue missions, especially in disaster zones where flooded rubble, puddles or partially submerged spaces can block access for conventional robots.

In tests, the scientists built plastic tubes that simulated various environments, such as flooded tunnels filled with carbon dioxide to replicate a low-oxygen environment. With the new 3D-printed suit, the cyborg insects were able to remain active and move underwater for up to three hours. This turns the land-based cyborg insect into an amphibious cyborg that could operate across both dry and wet terrain. The work builds on more than a decade of cyborg insect research at NTU, where Prof Sato has developed cyborg insects for applications across land, sea and air.

Universitat Jaume I students Pau Montagut Bofi and Mario García Blasco, from the Bachelor's Degree in Robotic Intelligence, have won first place in the international competition of the workshop From Data to Decisions: VLA Pipelines for Real Robots, a specialised event held within the framework of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026), the world's largest robotics conference, which took place in Vienna from 1 to 5 June.