Sandia team creates X-ray images of the future
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Updates every hour. Last Updated: 19-Sep-2025 16:11 ET (19-Sep-2025 20:11 GMT/UTC)
A team at Sandia National Labs has developed what they belive is a better way to X-Ray, harnessing different metals and the colors of light they emit.
“It’s called colorized hyperspectral X-ray imaging with multi-metal targets, or CHXI MMT for short,” said project lead Edward Jimenez, an optical engineer. Jimenez has been working with materials scientist Noelle Collins and electronics engineer Courtney Sovinec to create X-rays of the future.
“With this new technology, we are essentially going from the old way, which is black and white, to a whole new colored world where we can better identify materials and defects of interest,
The U.S. National Science Foundation and United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI) are investing in eight joint research projects that could open the door to breakthroughs in quantum computing, ultra-precise navigation and secure communications. The effort is supported by $4.7 million from NSF and £4.2 million from UKRI's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Each project brings together U.S. and U.K. researchers to tackle an underexplored area in science: how quantum information affects chemical reactions and molecular systems, and how that knowledge can be put to use. The UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering’s research project, funded with more than $636,000, is headed by Prof. David Awschalom and Prof. Giulia Galli, with Prof. Danna Freedman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A team of AI scientists and seismologists has developed a pioneering self-supervised framework, DASFormer, for high-resolution earthquake monitoring. Built on a two-stage, coarse-to-fine architecture, DASFormer is pre-trained on vast amounts of unlabeled Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) data collected from existing fiber-optic cables (e.g., Internet cables). Acting like a “self-taught seismologist”, the model first learns the predictable patterns of background noise and then flags earthquake signals as anomalies that defy its forecasts. This novel approach demonstrates superior performance, outperforming other state-of-the-art models. Its versatility extends to challenging environments such as the seafloor, underscoring its potential for scalable, automated seismic intelligence.
The civilian GPS signals are vulnerable to spoofing attacks in UAV system. A new on-board algorithm named MSSTP-OAD enables low-cost drones to detect counterfeit GPS positions in real time using only their existing GPS receiver and inertial unit—no extra radios, antennas or ground stations required. Compared to existing LSTM-based algorithms, the proposed method can achieve 98.4 % accuracy, 24 % faster detection and 26 % shorter recovery distance.
Award-winning Swansea University spin-out company Bionema Group Ltd has been awarded a major funding boost from Innovate UK.
Recently, the 2025 Volume 1, Issue 2 of Materials and Solidification, an English academic journal dedicated to the field of materials and solidification, has been officially published. Co-sponsored by Tsinghua University Press and academically supported by the State Key Laboratory of Solidification Processing (SKLSP) at Northwestern Polytechnical University (NPU), the journal is led by Professor Jinshan Li (from SKLSP, NPU) as Editor-in-Chief and Professor Junjie Wang (also from SKLSP, NPU) as Executive Editor-in-Chief. It aims to build a high-level academic exchange platform for researchers and engineering technology experts worldwide, promoting the research and development of solidification theory, material design, microstructure evolution, process innovation, and related fields.