Heriot-Watt University launches new scholarship set to open doors to further education for 30 exceptional students from Africa. 

What if you could create new materials just by shining a light them? To most, this sounds fantastical, but to physicists investigating Floquet engineering, this is the goal. With a periodic drive, like light, it’s possible to ‘dress up’ the electronic structure of any material, altering its fundamental properties – such as turning a simple semiconductor into a superconductor. While experimentally proven, light-driven Floquet requires strong drives that almost vaporize the material while achieving only modest effects. But researchers have now managed to achieve strong Floquet effect with a periodic drive just a fraction of the power required for modest light-driven Floquet – using excitons. This alternative method pavers the way to applied Floquet physics and thereby exciting novel quantum devices and applications.  

Researchers have developed a wearable, comfortable and washable device called Revoice that could help people regain the ability to communicate naturally and fluently following a stroke, without the need for invasive brain implants.

Strong winds, heavy precipitation, and cold air outbreaks are high-impact weather events that tend to occur frequently in the cold winter months and can cause exceptional situations even in Germany – as recently experienced when winter storm “Elli” struck the country. In order to advance our understanding of the underlying processes, the NAWDIC measurement campaign, coordinated by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), was launched on January 13, 2026 over the North Atlantic. Data collected during extensive aircraft and ground measurements should enable the researchers – in cooperation with other national and international partners – to better understand the processes and optimize weather-forecast models so that high-impact weather events can be predicted more accurately.

For the first time and with unprecedented accuracy, a team of researchers from the University of Basel has observed unique energy flow mechanisms in a semiconductor material following excitation by extremely short laser pulses. Gaining a better understanding of these energy flow is vital for improving the efficiency of electronic devices and computer chips.

Researchers publish first ever structural engineering manual for bamboo, a significant milestone in realising the benefits of bamboo and widening its adoption.