A study by Sapienza University, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), EY and IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia used virtual reality to measure interpersonal distance in 184 Italian and Japanese participants. The research was conducted during two major international public events: Expo 2025 in Osaka, Japan, and Maker Faire Rome, Italy. The findings reveal how culture, first impressions and implicit biases shape our personal space. The study has been published in Computers in Human Behavior.

Millions of people across the UK marvelled at the spectacular Northern Lights that lit up the night sky in May 2024. But while the display captivated skywatchers, the geomagnetic storm behind it also served as the biggest test in a generation of the UK's preparedness for severe space weather. So did it pass? Unfortunately not, according to scientists from the Space Environment Impacts Expert Group (SEIEG). They identified multiple infrastructure threats that the storm exposed and made 14 recommendations to better protect British electricity supplies, satellites, aviation and other critical infrastructure from future space weather events. The group's findings were presented this week at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting in Birmingham by SEIEG Chair Professor Richard Horne, of the British Antarctic Survey.

Spectral imaging allows materials to be identified without contact, but compact systems often struggle to preserve enough information for accurate reconstruction. Researchers from Zhejiang Normal University, Zhejiang University, and Westlake University have introduced a geometry-driven spectral encoding strategy based on the Euclidean Distance of Encoding space (EDE). Instead of optimizing only the statistical properties of an encoding matrix, EDE directly maximizes the separation between encoded spectral responses in measurement space. The team combined genetic algorithms, automatic differentiation, and transfer-matrix modeling to design manufacturable TiO₂/SiO₂ multilayer thin-film encoders. The resulting system improves reconstruction performance over random, correlation-optimized, and coherence-optimized benchmarks, and enables high-fidelity spectral recovery across the visible to short-wave infrared range. The work establishes a new geometric design paradigm for compact, intelligent computational optical systems.