New AI-powered method helps protect global chip supply chains from cyber threats
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 2-Apr-2026 16:15 ET (2-Apr-2026 20:15 GMT/UTC)
From smartphones to medical devices, computer chips power nearly everything we use today. But hidden deep inside these chips, there’s a little-known threat: hardware trojans — malicious modifications to a chip’s design that can steal data, weaken security and sabotage systems. Traditionally, detecting hardware trojans has been an expensive, time-consuming and complicated process. Now, University of Missouri researchers are introducing a new artificial intelligence-driven method to find these threats faster and more easily than before, said Ripan Kumar Kundu, a doctoral candidate in Mizzou’s College of Engineering. In a project led by Kundu, Mizzou’s team is leveraging existing large language models — the same type of AI that powers popular chatbots — to scan chip designs for hidden threats. The method doesn’t just identify suspicious lines of code with 97% accuracy; it also explains why it’s malicious, making the process more transparent.
Researchers have improved the ability of wearable health devices to accurately detect when a patient is coughing, making it easier to monitor chronic health conditions and predict health risks such as asthma attacks. The advance is significant because cough-detection technologies have historically struggled to distinguish the sound of coughing from the sound of speech and nonverbal human noises.
In a paper published in SCIENCE CHINA Earth Sciences, the researchers combined Eulerian and Lagrangian methods to more accurately quantify surface eddy meridional heat transport (EHT) induced by both the stirring and trapping effects of mesoscale eddies. They find that stirring-induced surface EHT is 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than trapping-induced EHT throughout most of the global ocean. These results demonstrate that the horizontal stirring effect of mesoscale eddies is the dominant mechanism of EHT.
Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome (HGPS) is a rare premature aging disease, and approximately 90% of cases are caused by progerin. Progerin is toxic and causes diverse abnormalities. More and more studies show that progerin is also detected in physiological aging and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Thus, targeting progerin clearance shows powerful potential for the treatment of HGPS, CKD and aging-related diseases. Now, Zhang group from Peking University and Kunming University of Science and Technology, reports that activating lysosome biogenesis can promote progerin clearance and alleviate cellular senescence in HGPS. They identify lysosome defects as a prevalent feature in HGPS, which impairs progerin clearance, and reveal that activating lysosome biogenesis can counteract lysosome defects and accelerate progerin clearance and mitigate DNA damage, cell cycle arrest, low proliferation ability and senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP) in HGPS cells. The findings highlight the vital role of lysosomes in progerin clearance, and uncover the potential of targeting lysosome biogenesis in anti-senescence.