The increasing accumulation of discarded plastics has already caused serious environmental pollution. Simple landfills and incineration will inevitably lead to the loss of the abundant carbon resources contained in plastic waste. In contrast, photoconversion technology provides a green and sustainable solution to the global plastic waste crisis by converting plastics into hydrogen fuel and valuable chemicals. This review briefly introduces the advantages of photoconversion technology and highlights recent research progress, with a focus on photocatalyst design as well as the thermodynamics and kinetics of the reaction process. It discusses in detail the degradation of typical common plastic types into hydrogen and fine chemicals via photoconversion. Additionally, it outlines future research directions, including the application of artificial intelligence in catalyst design. Although photocatalytic technology remains at the laboratory stage, with challenges in catalyst performance and industrial scalability, the potential for renewable energy generation and plastic valorization is promising.

Astronomers have uncovered a previously unknown, extreme kind of star factory by taking the temperature of a distant galaxy using the ALMA telescope. The galaxy is glowing intensely in superheated cosmic dust while forming stars 180 times faster than our own Milky Way. The discovery indicates how galaxies could have grown quickly when the universe was very young, solving a long-standing puzzle for astronomers. 

The first generations of stars formed under conditions very different from anywhere we can see in the nearby universe today. Astronomers are studying these differences using powerful telescopes that can detect galaxies so far away their light has taken billions of years to reach us.  

Now, an international team of astronomers led by Tom Bakx at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden has measured the temperature of one of the most distant known star factories. The galaxy, known as Y1, is so far away that its light has taken over 13 billion years to reach us.  

The National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), together with 11 international research partners, has demonstrated a record-breaking 430 terabits per second (Tb/s) optical transmission using a novel approach that extends the capacity of standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibers well beyond the original design.

The technology introduces a novel method that multiplies the usable capacity of certain spectral regions by up to three times. This approach exploits the properties of standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibers based on the ITU-T G.654 recommendation, which have been originally designed to operate with light at relatively long wavelengths, in the C and L bands of transmission bands. By using light with shorter wavelengths, in the O-band region, researchers were able to realize three-mode transmission instead of the traditional single-mode transmission. This effectively extended the optical fiber capacity well beyond the intended design by combining single-mode transmission in the E/S/C/L bands with three-mode transmission in the O band. The team achieved a new optical transmission record of 430 Tb/s in international-standard-compliant optical fibers, surpassing the previous our record of 402 Tb/s, which was also set in 2024. Remarkably, the new result was obtained using nearly 20% less overall bandwidth, resulting in a simpler system that demonstrates how existing infrastructure can be pushed even further without costly upgrades.

The new technology builds on standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fiber technology and has the potential to be applied to metropolitan area networks and inter-datacenter links, where high-capacity connections are increasingly in demand, and standard-compliant cutoff-shifted optical fibers are already installed. The combination of high throughput, reduced complexity, and compatibility with existing infrastructure points to a more scalable and energy-efficient future for optical communications.

This achievement was reported as a post deadline paper at the 51st European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) 2025 on Thursday Oct. 2, 2025, at the Bella Center, Copenhagen, Denmark, and was partly supported by the Japan-Germany Beyond 5G/6G collaboration initiative.

Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) has announced that, through joint research with KAIST, they developed a new technology that can implement stable quantum communication even in moving environments such as satellites, ships, and drones for the first time in the world.

As the C language, which forms the basis of critical global software like operating systems, faces security limitations, KAIST's research team is pioneering core original technology research for the accurate automatic conversion to Rust to replace it. By proving the mathematical correctness of the conversion, a limitation of existing Artificial Intelligence (LLM) methods, and solving C language security issues through automatic conversion to Rust, they presented a new direction and vision for future software security research. This work has been selected as the cover story for CACM, the world's highest-authority academic journal, thereby demonstrating KAIST's global research leadership in the field of computer science.

Photon avalanche (PA) upconversion, driven by a positive feedback loop that couples nonresonant ground-state absorption (GSA), resonant excited-state absorption (ESA), and highly efficient cross-relaxation (CR), gives rise to a threshold-triggered ultrahigh optical nonlinearity accompanied by uniquely prolonged rise-time dynamics. From spark to surge, this phenomenon can deliver tens to even hundreds of nonlinear orders at the nanoscale, redefining opportunities in imaging, sensing, and optical computing while opening a new paradigm for interrogating light–matter interactions.