Category Technology/Electronics

Biohybrid leaf mimics photosynthesis to turn COâ‚‚ and sunlight into useful chemicals

Solar-powered method lights the way to a 'de-fossilized' chemical industry
Semi-artificial organic photocathode (Front view). Credit: Celine Yeung

Researchers have demonstrated a new and sustainable way to make the chemicals that are the basis of thousands of products—from plastics to cosmetics—we use every day.

Hundreds of thousands of chemicals are manufactured by the chemical industry, which transforms raw materials—usually fossil fuels—into useful end products. Due to its size and its use of fossil fuel feedstocks, the chemical industry is responsible for roughly 6% of global carbon emissions.

But researchers led by the University of Cambridge are developing new methods that could one day lead to the “de-fossilization” of this important sector.

They have developed a hybrid device that combines light-harvesting organic polymers with bacter...

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Size doesn’t matter: Just a small number of malicious files can corrupt LLMs of any size

Size doesn't matter: just a small number of malicious files can corrupt LLMs of any size
Overview of our experiments, including examples of clean and poisoned samples, as well as benign and malicious behavior at inference time. (a)DoS pretraining backdoor experiments. Credit: arXiv (2025). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2510.07192

Large language models (LLMs), which power sophisticated AI chatbots, are more vulnerable than previously thought. According to research by Anthropic, the UK AI Security Institute and the Alan Turing Institute, it only takes 250 malicious documents to compromise even the largest models.

The vast majority of data used to train LLMs is scraped from the public internet. While this helps them to build knowledge and generate natural responses, it also puts them at risk from data poisoning attacks...

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Cyber defense innovation could significantly boost 5G network security

Breakthrough development could significantly boost 5G network security
Proposed FedLLMGuard Architecture. Credit: University of Portsmouth

A framework for building tighter security into 5G wireless communications has been created by a Ph.D. student working with the University of Portsmouth’s Artificial Intelligence and Data Center.

With its greater network capacity and ability to rapidly transmit huge amounts of information from one device to another, 5G is a critical component of intelligent systems and services—including those for health care and financial services.

However, the dynamic nature of 5G networks, the high volumes of data shared and the ever changing types of information transmitted means that these networks are extremely vulnerable to cyber threats and increasing risks of attack.

Hadiseh Rezaei, a Ph.D...

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Back to the future: Is light-speed analog computing on the horizon?

Back to the future: Is light-speed analog computing on the horizon?
Fabricated unitary universal device and its power-divider layer. Credit: UTS / Dr Rasool Keshavarz

Scientists have achieved a breakthrough in analog computing, developing a programmable electronic circuit that harnesses the properties of high-frequency electromagnetic waves to perform complex parallel processing at light-speed.

The discovery points to a new era of computing that operates far beyond the limits of conventional digital electronics, using less energy, while performing massive calculations.

The study, “Programmable circuits for analog matrix computations,” has been published in Nature Communications.

The research was led by Dr...

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