Top news stories for the week 35

Monday, Aug 24

Attackers bypass Windows security without physical access

Experts have shown that the most powerful security defenses in Windows 11 can be dismantled by an attacker who never touches the target computer.

Aug 24, 2026

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Workers in China worry over being replaced as they adapt to the growing impact of AI on jobs

Computer programmer Fei Zhaojun's boss asked him if artificial intelligence could soon replace humans in coding jobs. Two weeks later, he was laid off from his job in Beijing, together with about 160 of his colleagues.

Aug 24, 2026

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Purple fabric beats the heat, reflecting 87.6% of sunlight and cooling simulated skin

A new purple cooling fabric developed by Chinese and Australian researchers could help people stay cooler during scorching summer days without having to resort to wearing white.

Aug 24, 2026

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Mechanical engineers identify route to faster-charging, longer-lasting EV batteries

Can electric vehicles charge quickly without sacrificing battery longevity? A KAIST research team has identified a potential solution using a three-dimensional digital twin—a virtual model that recreates the internal microstructure ...

Aug 24, 2026

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Green methanol from thin air? Model finds water and CO₂ could be captured together

Persistent heat waves and below-average rainfall in spring and summer 2026 are causing drought conditions, falling groundwater levels and low river levels, including in the Rhine in Germany and elsewhere across Europe. At ...

Aug 24, 2026

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Fruit fly-inspired algorithm classifies odors from only a few samples

In the animal kingdom, energy conservation is essential for survival. That's why our brains have evolved to be extremely energy- and resource-efficient at storing and processing information. Since the 1980s, computational ...

Aug 24, 2026

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Scalable semitransparent organic PV modules could turn windows into power generators

Organic solar modules score points for their flexibility, transparency, and a particularly good environmental footprint. Wavelength-dependent transparency, in particular, is a major strength of organic photovoltaics. Researchers ...

Aug 24, 2026

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Tuesday, Aug 25

Electrified plasma heating offers a lower-carbon route to cement production

Cement is one of the most consumed materials globally, second only to water. However, the world's enormous appetite for cement also has an environmental cost: Its production generates more than a billion metric tons of carbon ...

Aug 25, 2026

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Erasable semiconductor is programmed with light

Researchers at Princeton Engineering have created a semiconductor with unique properties: It is just a few molecules thick and can repeatedly change its properties in response to light. This is a step toward building more ...

Aug 25, 2026

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Information encoded in a beam of light can survive real-world atmospheric turbulence

Researchers at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the University of Bordeaux in France have demonstrated a new way to send information through the atmosphere without correcting for the distortions that normally ...

Aug 25, 2026

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Baker's yeast helps store green hydrogen in alcohols, iron releases it

Hydrogen gas (H₂) is widely regarded as a promising clean energy source. By weight, it stores nearly three times more energy than gasoline, and its use does not directly release carbon dioxide (CO₂). Yet most H₂ is still ...

Aug 25, 2026

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Is there an AI bubble? No, but some tech companies show signs

Like past transformative technologies, from railroads and radio to the internet, artificial intelligence has attracted optimistic investors and inflated valuations, and with them speculation of a bubble market—when eager ...

Aug 25, 2026

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Major security weaknesses found in leading open-weight LLMs

Safety protections built into some of the world's most widely used artificial intelligence (AI) models can be stripped away with alarming ease, according to a new international study.

Aug 25, 2026

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A Chinese humanoid robot sets a new 100-meter sprint record at Beijing Games

A Chinese humanoid robot set a new 100-meter sprint record of 8.86 seconds in Beijing on Tuesday, beating its robot competitors—and the fastest recorded human time.

Aug 25, 2026

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Wednesday, Aug 26

Bill Gates warns world unprepared for AI upheaval

Bill Gates warned Wednesday that the world is dangerously unprepared for the upheaval brought by artificial intelligence, with the technology destroying jobs and threatening human connection, especially for young people.

Aug 26, 2026

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Amoeba-inspired method could enable energy-efficient hardware for complex optimization

Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous, underpinning decision-making in a wide range of fields, including logistics, transportation, communication networks, drug discovery and materials science. However, these ...

Aug 26, 2026

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Streamlined path-finding model helps unmanned vehicles search 15 times as fast as conventional model

A hiker is lost in the forest, and winter weather is setting in. The search needs to be speedy, thorough and efficient. Searchers send out an autonomous robotic drone. But how does it know where it should go? New research ...

Aug 26, 2026

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Giant cyborg cockroaches could bring supervised care to people trapped beyond rescuers' reach

"Swarms" of cyborg cockroaches with cameras and miniature medical injectors could deliver supervised emergency care to people trapped in collapsed buildings, caves or other places too dangerous for rescuers to reach. The ...

Aug 26, 2026

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ScaFi: A robot that grows like a fish, not a machine—from 2 feet to nearly 10

Propeller-powered underwater vehicles have long helped scientists explore and monitor aquatic environments. But they're limited by their own mechanics: Spinning blades can snag on vegetation, stir up sediment and startle ...

Aug 26, 2026

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Using light to distinguish real from fake with hard-to-replicate 'artificial fingerprints'

Shine a light, and the real can be distinguished from the fake. KAIST researchers have developed a security technology that uses unique artificial fingerprints created by the random assembly of nanoparticles. Although extremely ...

Aug 26, 2026

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AI agents are all the rage—but research shows they leak private data

Before you prompt AI to answer another question or perform another task, a Wake Forest computer scientist wants you to know it could expose your sensitive data.

Aug 26, 2026

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Thursday, Aug 27

AI doesn't just play better chess—it manages complexity differently

For decades, chess has served as a laboratory for studying intelligence and decision-making. It is well established that today's chess engines can outperform even the strongest grandmasters. But far less is understood about ...

Aug 27, 2026

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From cartwheels to backflips, motion-imitation framework teaches three robots dynamic movements

Legged robots, robotic systems with legs that typically resemble those of animals or humans, could be advantageous for completing tasks in home environments or populated, dynamic spaces. These robots may look like humans ...

Aug 27, 2026

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Nanoscale transistors achieve lower contact resistance with stepwise evaporation method

Metals, semiconductors and insulators are fundamental components of modern electronics. However, efforts to improve device performance have largely focused on semiconductor quality, while metal crystallinity has received ...

Aug 27, 2026

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Nearly 700 AI agents coordinated Hugging Face attack, says report

Nearly 700 OpenAI artificial intelligence agents coordinated an attack on the Hugging Face platform without human intervention during a well-publicized July incident, according to a report published Wednesday by independent ...

Aug 27, 2026

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Forged by fire, frozen for fuel: Thermal shock advances green energy

As the global push for cleaner energy intensifies, solid oxide fuel cells have emerged as a promising option. They turn hydrogen or other renewable fuels directly into electricity and heat without combustion, eliminating ...

Aug 27, 2026

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Six-legged robot learns to walk from a stick insect

Do you ever see an ant skittering across your kitchen counter and wonder how this little bug overcame all the obstacles in your home just to get there? Insects use their tiny nervous systems to walk with surprising dexterity—a ...

Aug 27, 2026

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Top tech companies urge global response against AI cyber threats

More than 100 organizations around the world, including ChatGPT maker OpenAI and rival Anthropic, have signed an open letter calling for a global effort to "strengthen cyber defenses" against AI-powered cybersecurity threats.

Aug 27, 2026

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Friday, Aug 28

Two ultrathin films turn low-grade heat into cooling without an electric motor

Refrigerators, air-conditioning systems and data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity, and cooling demand is constantly rising. A research team from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the University ...

Aug 28, 2026

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Brain-reading earbuds are already here, prompting urgent questions about children and neurodata

While it may sound like science fiction, earbuds that read brain activity are already on sale. Wearable technology company Neurable claims that its headphones, equipped with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, can track ...

Aug 28, 2026

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Multiple cameras can better track a person's identity using geometry and appearance

By combining two complementary clues—camera geometry and visual appearance—researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo, Japan, developed a new approach for preserving identities across multiple cameras. The method uses ...

Aug 28, 2026

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A humanoid robot's social expressiveness may backfire when it makes mistakes

For robots to be successfully deployed in real-world environments, humans should trust them enough to cooperate with them. Some roboticists have been trying to determine whether users perceive robots that exhibit socially ...

Aug 28, 2026

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Giving solid-state batteries a squeeze keeps them from short-circuiting

Lithium-ion batteries power transportation and grid storage and enable our digital lives, but these ubiquitous batteries require frequent recharging and can fail over time. To make batteries more reliable and longer-lasting, ...

Aug 28, 2026

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Magnetic memory could make edge AI faster while reducing energy use

Texas engineers teamed up with the world's largest semiconductor foundry to fabricate and test an emerging memory technology that could help meet the increasing energy demand of artificial intelligence.

Aug 28, 2026

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How AI could uncover the hidden ways people work together

Yankai Wang, a Ph.D. student in organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, was reading a paper about how transformers—the architecture behind large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Claude—might ...

Aug 28, 2026

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Saturday, Aug 29

Life cycle assessment identifies cleaner biodiesel pathways across five feedstocks

To mitigate climate change and limit global warming to within 1.5°C, scaling up global renewable energy capacity is an important goal. However, the transition to clean energy faces significant resource constraints.

Aug 29, 2026

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Sunday, Aug 30

Controlled crumples give inflatable membranes multiple stable shapes for adaptable designs

Inflatable structures are all around us, from pool floaties and archways at the Tour de France to life-saving emergency resuscitators and vehicle airbags. As useful as these structures are, they are limited to only two stable ...

Aug 30, 2026

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Some US cities have begun rewarding careful drivers with fewer red lights

Officials struggled for years to curb high-speed crashes along a residential corridor cutting through Albuquerque, New Mexico, but simply punishing the lead-footed drivers didn't seem to work.

Aug 30, 2026

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