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Photonics West 2026 highlighted how photonics research and innovations rapidly translate into commercial technologies, aligning with SPIE’s vision of photonics as a driver of economic opportunity.
Microsoft Research has developed a long-term data storage technique using borosilicate glass that leverages phase modifications to achieve unprecedented write speeds for glasslaser storage. They suggest data integrity for a lifetime of 10,000 years.
Flying cars integrate ground-vehicle mobility with aircraft capabilities, making them candidates for deployment in the low-altitude economy and emergency rescue. We have advanced three enabling technologies — morphology design, multi-modal fusion perception, and active safety — across four generations of flying-car platforms.
Sustainable electronics must achieve high performance while dramatically cutting energy consumption, material waste and environmental impact across the entire lifecycle of electronic systems.
NANOMETA 2026 revealed that the frontiers of nanophotonics and metamaterials are advancing faster than ever, driven by bold ideas and a deepening understanding of how light and information intertwine.
The growth of artificial intelligence requires better computation at lower energy. Semiconductors remain the more prolific materials platform driving practical improvements to device hardware. Here, the authors outline a critical pathway for accelerating the transfer of early findings in material science into manufactural processes for faster scale-up and technology applications.
As wind farms multiply, wake effects from upwind wind farms reduce downwind output, a phenomenon known as ‘wind theft’ that costs billions and sparks disputes. Interdisciplinary collaboration can address this growing challenge.
IEDM 2025 highlighted the increasingly synergistic relationship between industrial and academic communities, particularly in advancing solutions to device reliability mechanisms, process integration and yield challenges, and application-driven performance requirements.
Artificial intelligence systems are becoming gigawatt-scale, always-on workloads that today’s power systems were not built to carry. Capacity expansion and short-term coordination alone cannot close this gap. Here, we argue that alignment requires a structural perspective: enabling energy and computation systems to interpret each other’s structural organization and evolving constraints.
Continued scaling brings intertwined challenges in transport and heat dissipation. Advancing 3D nanodevice technologies requires a unified understanding of electron and energy flow, an expanded toolbox of integration-ready materials, and stronger alignment between theoretical modelling and fabrication strategies to drive innovation effectively.
A study in Nature shows that atomically thin MoS2 electronics intrinsically withstand space radiation, as validated by 9 months of stable on-orbit operation in low Earth orbit.
Semimetal-in-oxide design unlocks tellurium oxides for p-type devices, combining performance, scalability and process compatibility for future low-power logic, advanced integration, sensing and resilient electronics.
A study in Nature Communications introduces a personalized federated learning framework that enables privacy-preserving, high-accuracy detection of battery faults across heterogeneous electric-vehicle charging data.
Ensuring battery safety and longevity requires cost-effective and scalable diagnostics, yet these are hindered by the ‘black box’ nature of batteries and limited sensing technology. Active perturbations could elicit informative responses that improve diagnostic performance and provide mechanistic insights, unlocking rapid and interpretable diagnostics.
Researchers introduce sodium sulfamate as a bromine scavenger for zinc/bromine flow batteries, reducing levels of corrosive free bromine. This innovation boosts energy density, cycle life, and corrosion resistance, offering a promising route to stable, cost-effective large-scale energy storage.
There are challenges in making large-scale and full utilization of renewable energy in power systems. We consider the need to integrate prediction, analysis, dispatch and control — and call for a systems engineering approach to power system operation that can enhance the utilization of renewable energy.
This year brings fresh perspectives to our editorial team, alongside a renewed focus on delivering authoritative insights and fostering collaboration. Together, let’s make 2026 a year of innovation, dialogue and transformative breakthroughs.
A study in Nature Photonics reports a miniaturized cascaded-diode-array spectral imager that enables electrically tunable spectral measurements from 365 nm down to 250 nm.
