A team in Belgium led by Professor Dries Van Thourhout reports on a novel type of surface emitting laser, directly integrated on standard 300 mm silicon wafers.  It is based on a one-dimensional array of nano-ridges that forms a photonic crystal cavity, enabling strong in-plane confinement while emitting light vertically. The GaAs photonic crystal is directly grown on the silicon substrate, using a combination of aspect ratio trapping and nano-ridge engineering. By varying the array period and nano-ridge dimensions, the emission wavelength can be controlled.  This is a first step towards a cost-effective alternative for traditional VCSELs, which are today widely used in optical interconnects and consumer products such as mobile phones and optical mice.

Industrial inspection systems often miss subtle defects or fail when sensors are slightly misaligned. To address this, researchers have developed MambaAlign, a new multimodal framework that efficiently fuses Red, Green, Blue images with auxiliary sensors such as thermal or depth data. It captures long-range, orientation-aware features, and is more robust to modest misalignment. It significantly improves localization accuracy while sustaining real-time performance, making it suitable for practical, high-throughput inspection environments.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly reshaping medicine, yet how future doctors feel about AI remain poorly understood in Japan. The newly developed 12-item attitudes towards artificial intelligence (ATTARI-12) scale has shown good validity and reliability, prompting researchers to create a Japanese version, J-ATTARI-12. Validated among medical students and residents across Japan, J-ATTARI-12 offers a structured way to understand readiness, concerns, and acceptance of AI in medical training and practice.

Shrinking ferroelectric tunnel junctions can significantly boost their performance in memory devices, as reported by researchers from Science Tokyo. The team fabricated nanoscale junctions directly on silicon substrates and analyzed conduction mechanisms across a wide temperature range and multiple device scales. They found that smaller junction areas produced much larger resistance contrasts between the ‘ON’ and ‘OFF’ states, demonstrating that miniaturization could directly improve both efficiency and reliability in future non-volatile memory technologies.

Countries with stronger and better-targeted climate policies are cutting carbon emissions significantly faster, a major new study finds. Analysing more than 3,900 policies across 43 economies, researchers show that climate policies have already avoided over 3 billion tonnes of CO₂ in a single year, with the biggest gains coming from policies focused on high-emitting sectors such as energy, industry and transport.

Researchers at the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS) and Imperial College London have overturned a long-standing assumption about how life begins at the molecular level. Using a new high-resolution technology, they show that the genome is far more organised during its earliest moments than previously believed. Understanding this 3D organisation is critical, as its failure can lead to developmental disorders and diseases such as cancer.