As the world burns hotter and hotter, we are having to find new ways to deal with fire. I have two stories about fire and technology in the Northern Hemisphere. Perhaps later this year I will be able to round this out with stories about fire and technology from the Southern Hemisphere once the seasons shift. Although I world prefer that at least part of this planet has a quiet fire season.
Europe: France, Spain, and Portugal
John Laurenson wrote an August 4 (?), 2026 article for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news online about the technology being developed to fight fires
Hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to leave their homes across France, Spain and Portugal as wildfires tore through forests and countryside.
In France, four men have already lost their lives fighting the wildfires and another 150 have been injured.
But why are humans and 30-year old planes being used? Why can drones replace soldiers in Ukraine but not firefighters?
Chief sergeant Guillaume Millet, a firefighter of 24 years experience heads the Fire and Rescue Service branch of the CFDT union in the Gironde, the region worst hit by wildfires in France this summer.
He says that while the techniques for tackling fire have not changed much, technology in forest fire detection has.
“The big change, especially in my département, is that now we’ve got cameras assisted by artificial intelligence to watch the forest and see where fires are starting,” Millet says.
“In the Gironde, cameras have replaced the human look-outs we had in watch towers in every town throughout the summer months,” he says. Those lookouts were often students.
The switch has reduced false alarms, he says. “An AI-assisted camera can distinguish with almost total certainty between smoke and dust thrown up by a tractor in a field, for example.”
They have an impressive range as well, detecting fires up to 20km (12 miles) away.
In the Gironde, the system was installed by a company called Midgard. In other parts of France, it’s another French start-up called FireTracking.
“As soon as the system detects a fire, there’s an alert on the fire fighters’ telephones. They open the application and see what the camera is seeing with a x40 [40 times] zoom,” explains FireTracking’s CEO Jean-Simon Chaudier.
“Next to that real-time video there’s a map with the exact location of the fire, the position of any nearby houses and a simulation of how, given the weather, the level of humidity and so on, it is expected to spread from minute to minute,” he adds.
And every minute is vital. “For the past 10 days, for example, we have the feedback from a firefighter that our AI detected seven fires 15 minutes before the first phone call. If you can help a firefighter to save 15 minutes, it’s the difference between a catastrophe and a fire which can be limited to two or three hectares,” Chaudier says.
“After one minute you can put out a fire with a glass of water, after two you need a tank of water, after three minutes you need to send a Canadair,” Chaudier says, talking about the amphibious planes that scoop up water from rivers, lakes and the sea to dump it on the flames that are the spearhead of forest fire fighting here and around the world.
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AI fire detection is going to get better over the coming years. The French civil protection service has a programme called Condor, for example, which is testing solar-powered drones that carry out continuous patrols with electro-optical cameras and AI.
There are also projects with sensors placed among the trees. Spain’s SenForFire, for example, which measures gases released before flames become visible.
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TankerVision: AI-powered fire prediction (a Canadian initiative)
As wildfires grow larger, faster and impact more communities across Canada, researchers at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) are developing new technology that could give first responders a critical advantage: the ability to predict how a fire will evolve hours into the future.
Professor Steven Waslander (UTIAS) is working with researchers at Natural Resources Canada and Simon Fraser University on TankerVision — a project aimed at creating more accurate, AI-powered fire prediction models.
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The team has partnered with government agencies and industry, including BC Wildfire, Alberta Wildfire, Canadian Forestry Services, aircraft operator Conair Aerial Firefighting, and Voxelis, a wildfire monitoring service provider.
“Wildfire growth is currently estimated using 15 to 20 prescribed burns from the 1980s, plus data on weather, wind and forest conditions, all fused with decades of human experience,” says Waslander.
“But this method hasn’t been adapted to current fire severity increases due to climate change and involved a great deal of extrapolation from a limited dataset.”
“Our big idea here is to use AI and computer vision to capture unprecedented numbers of fires from the air to build more sophisticated, data-driven wildfire prediction models.”
To do this, high‑resolution colour and infrared cameras and computers are installed inside the piloted aircraft that are currently used to monitor and fight fires.
In 2024, the team began collecting data onboard a bird-dog aircraft, which circles above wildfires to guide water bombers. These planes spend hours tracking the fire line, making them ideal for gathering continuous, high‑quality footage.
:All the storage is on board the aircraft so our partners can review the data before we start working on it to make sure we aren’t logging any confidential information.”
First, each image is segmented by AI to identify which pixels correspond to fire, smoke or ground. This is trickier than it sounds, as capturing the extent of smoke in an image can be difficult for modern segmentation techniques.
The task poses similar challenges to autonomous navigation in adverse weather conditions — variables Waslander is already familiar with as the lead investigator of the WinTOR all-weather driving program.
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“Last season, we logged 50 fires, which is currently the highest number recorded in one season,” says Waslander.
“This year, we plan to expand the data collection efforts to three aircraft and hope to capture more than 100 wildfires, sufficient to start developing and validating our prediction models.”
The team is now preparing hardware for this fire season and hopes to expand partnerships across the country, including in Ontario, to help transform how Canada responds to wildfires.
The team’s first research paper, focused on segmentation, has been submitted, with a full-system paper and public dataset planned for release in fall 2026.
Waslander says the project resonates deeply with students and researchers who have witnessed the increase in severe fires firsthand.
“I think everyone involved in the project really feels passionately about the direction we’re going and see it as an opportunity to make a real impact on keeping us safe in the years to come as things get hotter,” says Waslander.
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I can’t find anything more about TankerVision on the Natural Resources Canada or Simon Fraser University websites. Hopefully more information will become available.
Replacing firefighters?
The short answer is: not anytime soon. All these technology initiatives are aimed at improving our ability to find hot sports and fires and to respond quickly.
Before diving into the story, Vancouver Police Department’s ‘robo cop’ was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) a few years ago and for anyone unfamiliar with the disease, here’s more from the ALS Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as motor neuron disease (MND) or Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a rare terminal neurodegenerative disease defined by the progressive loss of both upper and lower motor neurons that normally control voluntary muscle contraction. ALS is the most common of the motor neuron diseases.[8] ALS often presents with gradual muscle stiffness, twitches, weakness, and wasting. Motor neuron loss typically continues until the ability to eat, speak, move, and breathe without mechanical support is lost. At least 50% of people with ALS experience significant changes in thinking and behavior, with 15% of individuals going on to develop frontotemporal dementia.[9][10] …
Lee Marten, right, is a Vancouver police sergeant who is one of the first Canadians to be implanted with a Neuralink brain chip in a bid to help him with symptoms of ALS or spinal injuries. His wife, Lisa, is seen in Toronto Western Hospital on May 20 before his procedure. (Submitted by Lisa Marten)
That prognosis makes the decision to go ahead with an experimental brain implant instantly understandable. Lyndsay Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) news online website details the officer’s and his family’s story,
Sitting in his wheelchair, hands at his side, 48-year-old Lee Marten looks at the computer screen in front of him and imagines moving the cursor across the screen. As quickly as he thinks it, the arrow shifts.
Marten, who is a sergeant with the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) currently on leave, uses the cursor to type letters on a digital keyboard — as fast as, or faster, than human fingers. Right away, the latest Toronto Blue Jays score pops up.
“I know it seems like science fiction,” he said. “But here I am and it works.”
On May 20 [2026], Marten became one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive a Neuralink brain implant, as part of a clinical trial at University Health Network’s (UHN) Toronto Western Hospital.
He is just the 26th person in the world to undergo the procedure, which is being tested on people unable to move because of ALS or spinal injuries. At least two other Canadians, both quadriplegics, are also known to have received the implant in Canada, and a dual American-Canadian citizen with ALS has had the procedure done in the U.S.
Neuralink is owned by controversial trillionaire [not now on August 5, 2026] Elon Musk, and the hospital has faced criticism for participating in the trial.
But Marten sees the procedure as a chance to improve his quality of life and advance science in a way that could help others.
“Getting a terminal diagnosis, you don’t have much to look forward to,” he said.
“This is going to maybe improve my time that I have left, and allow me to be a kind of trailblazer for anyone else going through this.”
Long road to diagnosis
Marten’s symptoms began in April 2022. He was working on the bike patrol with the Vancouver Police Department when his left foot began to drop.
At first, he thought it was a cycling injury, but he kept losing his balance. A fall off the steps to his garage led to a broken leg.
Doctors attributed the symptoms to a benign brain tumour and Marten had surgery to remove it in March 2024.
But the mobility problems continued to worsen, and three years after he first felt unwell, the devastating diagnosis came. ALS was destroying the nerve cells in his brain and spinal cord. It is progressive and there is no cure.
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The disease’s progression varies from patient to patient, but Marten said the hardest part about knowing he will die from ALS is that he won’t be able to watch his children, Rys, 14, and Carys, 11, grow up.
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“People joke that I’m going to be RoboCop,” he said, laughing, in an interview shortly before the procedure.
“I’m going to be a cyborg, right?”
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The Martens’ biggest hope for the surgery was that it would allow him to communicate with family through a computer after he is no longer able to physically speak.
Lisa said this will be helpful with medical decisions, including those around a potential medically-assisted death.
“We can get his true feelings on what he wants to do,” she said.
The trial at UHN’s Toronto Western Hospital, CAN-PRIME, is one of a handful of Neuralink studies taking part across the world, including ones in the U.S., U.K. and Abu Dhabi.
The procedure involves implanting more than 1,000 electrodes, each thinner than a human hair, into the brain’s motor cortex. Surgeons open the skull and prepare the site, but the electrodes are inserted by a two-metre-tall robot shipped to Toronto from San Francisco.
“The robot is crucial because it’s much more accurate and precise than a human neurosurgeon could do,” said Dr. Andres Lozano, who leads the neurosurgery team at UHN’s Toronto Western.
The hospital has faced criticism for participating in the trial, including from an emergency physician who said that Canadian institutions should not work with companies owned by Musk, who was behind U.S. government cuts to global health. Neuralink has also been criticized for how it shares information.
Lozano said the trial went through a series of ethical screens, and passed all of them. [emphasis mine]
“We jumped at the opportunity to participate because we think the technology is very advanced and we think it really has an opportunity to help patients,” he said, adding that it may be possible in the future for paralyzed patients to control movement of a wheelchair, or even a specialized exoskeleton, through Neuralink brain implants.
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A ‘scary’ change in plans
The day of Marten’s surgery started with stress when they learned his surgery would be different from those of previous Neuralink patients.
For the first time, surgeons would not peel back the dura, or protective layer around the brain. Instead, the robot would insert the chip through the dura.
Lozano called it a “tremendous advance in technology” that could make the operation simpler, and safer.
But the new plan made Lisa nervous.
“They didn’t tell us until just before he went in that he was going to be the first person in the world to have the new procedure done,” she said. “That’s where it got a little scary.”
Lee, on the other hand, was ready.
“I’m like, let’s get ‘er done.”
The procedure took six hours and doctors say it was a success.
Marten woke up in the ICU with 27 staples in his scalp and a brutal headache. Painkillers helped, and he says about an hour after waking up, he was working with Neuralink engineers to try out the device.
“They told me I was the first out of all the participants [to] do that so soon after surgery,” he said. “And I’m like, well, Canadians are just built tougher.”
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Since returning to Vancouver, he has “homework” that consists of doing exercises every couple of days so the Neuralink engineers can monitor how the device is working. It keeps him busy.
Marten has plans to make playlists for his kids, and play video games with them, even when he can no longer move or speak.
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Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article offers more including images and an embedded video. There’s also a five minute CBC Radio interview of Lindsay Duncombe by Stephen Quinn on CBC’s The Early Edition. Dunscombe was a bit of an ‘easy, breezy’ interview subject who displays the kind of enthusiasm you’d expect from someone presenting science to children; the sort of thing you might expect at a science centre. (Confession: Sometimes I sound like an enthused science fan too.)
It doesn’t seem enough to say bravo to the Martens; they are facing an extraordinarily difficult time with grace and courage.
Now, onto some of the issues not explored in Duncombe’s article or interview.
Ethics and other issues
What struck me in Duncombe’s account is the UHN’s failure to alert the family to a change in how the surgery would be conducted. Six hours notice? Someone had to know that procedure would be different. Wasn’t the surgical team prepped for this change long before? There seems to no reason to give the family only sic hours notice.
Regarding ethics, there’s this somewhat unclear statement in Duncombe’s July 2, 2026 article “Lozano (Dr. Andres Lozano, who leads the neurosurgery team) said the trial went through a series of ethical screens, and passed all of them.”
Whose (which institution? Health Canada, University of Toronto, Toronto Western Hospital?) ethical screens?
Who (which institution? …) conducted these analyses?
How did giving the family six hours notice of a significant change in the operation pass an ethical test?
Does the university and/or the hospital have a financial relationship of any kind with Neuralink?
Does the surgical lead, Dr. Andres Lozano, have any kind of financial relationship with Neuralink?
Is it a good idea to get brain implants from commercial companies?
What about Lee Marten’s thoughts? Does he own them?
I have over the years written a number of pieces about brain or neural implants with a focus on some of these questions. This list includes a number of my postings but I’m going to start the list with a CBC article by Sheena Goodyear,
Why your brain could be the next frontier of data privacy, an October 11, 2024 article by Sheena Goodyear on the CBC Radio’s As It Happens webpage. It includes the As It Happens radio segment along with other embedded materials exploring the issue of neural privacy.
Tech companies want your brain (data), an April 23, 2026 takes a look at data derived from consumer products marketed as devices that aid with meditation or relaxation or focus and worn externally can harvest brain date used for research purposes. Did you check that contract you signed?
There appears to be some action by the Canadian federal government to address privacy issues with neural data. First, here’s a February 13, 2026 opinion piece by Kris Klein for the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) about the Canadian federal government’s addition to a list of what constitutes sensitive information, Note: A link has been removed,
Privacy professionals have long lived with a comforting illusion: that “sensitive information” is a relatively stable concept. Health data is sensitive. Financial data is sensitive. Social Insurance Numbers are sensitive. This mental list has served us well for years and fits neatly into training decks and compliance frameworks.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada [OPC] has gently reminded us that this list is not static.
This week, the OPC updated its Interpretation Bulletin on Sensitive Information under the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, which consolidates court decisions and OPC findings on what counts as sensitive personal information and what that means for consent and safeguards. What’s new? Your brain has now officially entered the chat. The OPC added neural data among the types of personal information that will generally be considered sensitive and require a higher degree of protection.
The bulletin explains a principle privacy professionals know well but sometimes treat as theoretical. While some types of information will almost always be sensitive, any personal information can become sensitive depending on context. Names and addresses are the classic example. Usually harmless, unless the context reveals something deeply personal about the individual.
Under PIPEDA, sensitivity drives two critical compliance outcomes: the form of consent an organization must obtain and the level of security safeguards it must apply. In other words, sensitivity is not an academic label. It determines how hard organizations must work to justify collection, explain purposes and protect the data they hold.
Neural data, now formally on the “sensitive personal information” list broadly refers to information derived from the activity of the nervous system, particularly the brain. This can include data collected through technologies such as electroencephalography, brain computer interfaces, neuroimaging tools or wearable devices designed to measure brain signals. In practice, this can range from clinical brain scans to consumer-facing technologies that claim to monitor our focus, fatigue or emotional states.
In a nutshell, it is data generated by your brain doing brain things.
Used responsibly, neural data has clear benefits. In health care, it can support diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation for neurological conditions. In accessibility contexts, brain computer interfaces have the potential to restore communication or mobility for individuals with severe disabilities. In workplace safety and transportation, fatigue detection technologies are being explored as tools to reduce accidents.
At the same time, the risks are not subtle. Neural data is deeply intimate. It may reveal health conditions, cognitive states or emotional responses that individuals themselves do not fully understand or expect to disclose. Unlike a password, you can’t simply reset your brain. Unlike a credit card number, neural patterns are not easily replaced.
The OPC’s decision to flag neural data as sensitive reflects these realities. It signals that some information is so personal that heightened care is not optional. Organizations collecting or experimenting with neural data should assume that meaningful consent must be robust, safeguards must be proportionate and purposes must be tightly defined.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has added “neural data” to the list of personal information that will generally be considered sensitive and require a higher degree of protection. See the section: Application by the Courts and the OPC in Different Contexts.
Today [June 16, 2026], the Government of Canada introduced Bill C-36, an Act to enact the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act (PPCDA), to amend the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act [PIPEDA] and to make consequential and related amendments to other Acts.
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In a June 17, 2026 blog posting on his companies website (CloudForce) Anton Kuznetsov outlines changes in the proposed bill C-36 that will affect Canadian businesses, Note: Links have been removed,
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Why Canada Needed a New Privacy Law
PIPEDA has governed commercial privacy for 25 years. It was built for a world without cloud infrastructure, AI-driven decision-making, or mass data brokerage. Its enforcement model reflects that: the Privacy Commissioner investigates, recommends, and can apply to Federal Court, but cannot impose fines directly. The maximum penalty for a violation is $100,000.
That limitation has consequences. In 2024-25, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner received 686 breach reports from private-sector businesses under PIPEDA — affecting over 20 million Canadians. Complaints to the OPC rose 32% in the same period. (OPC 2024-25 Annual Report) The average cost of a Canadian data breach reached CA$6.98 million in 2025 — a 10.4% increase year-over-year. (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025 – Canada) The enforcement regime was not designed for this environment.
Bill C-36 is the Carney government’s response — a revised version of Bill C-27, which died on the Order Paper when Parliament prorogued in January 2025. (IAPP, Canada’s Bill C-36 introduces privacy reforms, enforcement changes)
What Changes: PIPEDA to PPCDA
Bill C-36 enacts the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act (PPCDA), which replaces Part 1 of PIPEDA — the commercial privacy section. PIPEDA itself survives in narrowed form, renamed the *Electronic Documents Act*, covering only its electronic documents and signatures provisions.
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Dr. Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law and more) offers a rather peppery analysis of the proposed legislation in a June 15, 2026 blog posting and another on June 18, 2026 on his eponymous website.
I have not been able to find a reference to neural data or any other neural implant issues in the discussion about Bill C-36. If someone has located something, please let me know in the Comments.
In the end
Given the same circumstances, if I had been presented with the choice that the Martens were given, I too would have opted for the implant. Desperation will drive you to places you might not visit elsewise.
That six hour notice of a change prior to the operation? It rings alarm bells and brings to mind “move fast and break things” usually accompanied by “it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission,” both of them favourites in the technology sector. Neuralink, after all, is a company owned by Elon Musk who is not famed for his deliberation or thoughtfulness and his companies are not known for their openness (see: 2025’s “The Tesla Files; a Whistleblower, a Leak, a Fight for Truth : the Inside Story of Musk’s Empire” by Sönke Iwersen for more about Musk’s Tesla operations [focus on European operations] and its level of secrecy).
There are other issues as well, what happens if the company goes out of business or discontinues this particular product?
I don’t imagine the federal government will manage to cover every contingency but it is concerning that Prime Minister Carney’s Liberals are in such a rush to stimulate ‘innovation’ that they appear oblivious to the implications of technology such as computer-brain interfaces (CBI) and more. For many, (see CBC Radio interview of Lindsay Duncombe) it is treated as the stuff of futuristic science fiction. As you can see from this piece and a cornucopia of articles elsewhere in print and online, that belief is deeply erroneous.
Hopefully, I’m wrong and the Canadian federal government is alive to the many possibilities good and ill afforded by these ‘science fiction’ technologies and is examining ways to ensure safe implementation.
Caption: The left image shows the tomato-picking robot and camera. The right image shows a ‘robot-eye view’ of the tomatoes. Red represents mature fruits, green indicates immature fruits, and blue indicates selected harvesting targets. Credit: Osaka Metropolitan University
In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots. However, some fruits, like tomatoes, are tricky to harvest. Tomatoes typically bear fruit in clusters, requiring robots to pick the ripe ones while leaving the rest on the vine, demanding advanced decision-making and control capabilities.
To teach robots how to become tomato pickers, Osaka Metropolitan University Assistant Professor Takuya Fujinaga, Graduate School of Engineering, programmed them to evaluate the ease of harvesting for each tomato before attempting to pick it.
Fujinaga’s new model uses image recognition paired with statistical analysis to evaluate the optimal approach direction for each fruit. The system involves image processing/vision of the fruit, its stems, and whether it is concealed behind another part of the plant. These factors inform robot control decisions and help it choose the best approach.
The model represents a shift in focus from the traditional ‘detection/recognition’ model to what Fujinaga calls a ‘harvest‑ease estimation’. “This moves beyond simply asking ‘can a robot pick a tomato?’ to thinking about ‘how likely is a successful pick?’, which is more meaningful for real‑world farming,” he explained.
When tested, Fujinaga’s new model demonstrated an 81% success rate, far above predictions. Notably, about a quarter of the successes were tomatoes that were successfully harvested from the right or left side that had previously failed to be harvested by a front approach. This suggested that the robot changed its approach direction when it initially struggled to pick the fruit.
Ultimately, Fujinaga’s research highlights the nuance involved in fruit-picking for robots with factors including fruit clustering, stem geometry, background leaves, and occlusion all being important. “This research establishes ‘ease of harvesting’ as a quantitatively evaluable metric, bringing us one step closer to the realization of agricultural robots that can make informed decisions and act intelligently,” he said.
Fujinaga sees a future where robots will be able to independently determine whether crops are ready for harvest. “This is expected to usher in a new form of agriculture where robots and humans collaborate,” he explained. “Robots will automatically harvest tomatoes that are easy to pick, while humans will handle the more challenging fruits.”
A strawberry being dipped in the agar-based solution. Credit: Clare Kiernan.
University of British Columbia researchers have developed an edible, seaweed-derived coating that can keep strawberries fresh for at least four days at room temperature, outperforming uncoated berries stored in the fridge.
The breakthrough could help address one of the food industry’s most persistent challenges: reducing food waste. Nearly half of all food produced in Canada is lost or wasted, costing the economy an estimated $58 billion annually. Fresh fruits and vegetables are particularly vulnerable to spoilage, losing moisture and becoming susceptible to mould and bacteria during storage and transport.
Published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the findings offer a simple approach for extending produce shelf life and reducing reliance on refrigeration across the supply chain. Maintaining cold temperatures from farm to warehouse to truck to grocery store requires significant energy and infrastructure, especially for fresh produce transported over long distances.
“We wanted to find a simple alternative to cold storage,” said senior author Dr. Tianxi Yang, an assistant professor in UBC’s faculty of land and food systems. “Once we added the coating, the fruit became far less sensitive to changes in temperature and moisture and stayed fresh longer.”
A familiar ingredient, reimagined
The coating is made from agar, a substance derived from red seaweed that is widely used as a vegan alternative to gelatin and as a thickener in foods like puddings and jellies. On its own, agar forms a thick gel. But when researchers combined it with zinc, an essential nutrient, and tannic acid, a naturally occurring plant compound found in grapes and tea, the material transformed — self-assembling into tiny microparticles that create a thin protective layer around the fruit.
When dipped in the solution, strawberries, grapes and apple slices emerged with a thin, edible coating that dried completely clear.
“It was exciting to watch the particles self-assemble in real time, from a cloudy, milky liquid into this incredibly uniform, protective layer,” said doctoral student Ivy Chiu, the study’s lead author. “To our knowledge, no one had made an agar-based microparticle coating like this before.”
Fresher, longer, with a lighter footprint
Over four days at room temperature, coated strawberries lost less than half as much water as uncoated fruit and remained noticeably firmer, with more vitamin C and antioxidants preserved. Grapes and apple slices showed similar benefits, with improvements lasting 14 days and 24 hours, respectively.
By comparison, untreated strawberries stored at room temperature began developing mould within two days, while refrigeration only extended their shelf life slightly — most untreated berries began to deteriorate by day four.
Coated strawberries stored without refrigeration remained mould-free for at least four days, while those stored in the fridge stayed fresh for at least six days.
The coating also showed antibacterial properties and no signs of toxicity in tests using human intestinal cells. For consumers who prefer to remove the coating before eating, most of it can be washed away with tap water within two minutes.
A life-cycle assessment found that the coating has a 14 per cent lower carbon footprint than conventional refrigeration and reduces freshwater ecotoxicity by about 85 per cent, largely by reducing reliance on the electricity and refrigerants required for cold storage.
From lab to grocery aisle
To assess its potential for real-world use, the team replaced laboratory-grade agar with commercially available food-grade agar. The results remained consistent, with coated strawberries showing reduced moisture loss and spoilage while maintaining quality.
“Our hope is to help keep produce fresh for longer throughout the food system,” said Dr. Yang. “If we can reduce spoilage during storage and transportation, we can reduce food waste while using less energy to preserve food.”
The research team is now testing the coating on additional fruits and vegetables and investigating how it could be scaled, tested and integrated into commercial food systems.
Caption: Earthen Rituals, exhibited at the 2026 Venice Architecture Biennial, is constructed with 3D-printed earthen materials by Lola Ben-Alon and the Natural Materials Lab. Credit: Alessandro Terranova
An ingredient that gives ice cream a creamier texture could make natural earthen materials like clay and sand easier to 3D-print into durable structures, according to new research led by scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder.
The discovery could help turn construction waste into building materials with lower environmental impact.
“From termite mounds to adobe buildings, humans and animals have been building with earth since the dawn of time,” said Wil Srubar, professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “But there hasn’t been a lot of science to how earthen builders design the materials. So, we wanted to use scientific knowledge and tools to understand it.”
In nature, termites construct towering mounds. Wasps build intricate nests, and honeycomb worms create reef-like structures along coastlines. Rather than relying on cement, these organisms use biopolymers, which are large biological molecules that act like glue, often found in saliva, to bind natural materials like soil and clay together.
Inspired by nature’s designs, Srubar and his team, including researchers at Columbia University in New York, set out to investigate which biopolymer could bind earthen materials and make them 3D-printable.
The team tested five biopolymers, including legume-derived guar gum, locust bean gum and cassia gum. These compounds are commonly found in food products like salad dressings to keep oil and water from separating. They also studied sodium alginate, derived from seaweed, and xanthan gum, produced by fermenting sugar.
The researchers found that locust bean gum could hold earthen materials tightly together by binding soil particles into a stronger network. But that same effect made the material harder to push through a 3D-printer nozzle.
Sodium alginate, often found in ice cream and used to make spherical foods like popping boba, produced the opposite effect. Instead of functioning like a glue, the polymer changed the electrical charges on clay particles, causing them to repel one another, similar to how the same poles of two magnets push each other away.
As a result, adding sodium alginate to clay and sand produced materials that allowed the particles to suspend in a stable mixture while still flowing smoothly through a 3D printer.
Then the team searched for the best formulation. To natural earth excavated from a granite quarry near Golden, Colorado, they added just 0.12% of sodium alginate, which produced a material that was both strong and printable. It could withstand 25% more pressure than earth without the biopolymer and could be printed 33% faster.
Using the formula, the team printed an 8-millimeter-thick (0.3-inch) wall that leaned outward at dramatic angles. They found that the structure could remain stable even when tilted to 60 degrees, far steeper than the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
While the current study focuses primarily on improving the printability of earthen materials, Srubar said scientists could use the same framework to test other biopolymers for enhanced properties such as strength and durability.
“There are some good indoor environmental benefits of having earth in a building,” said Samuel Armistead, a research associate in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering. “It can regulate indoor moisture and uptake air pollutants. It can also serve as a thermal insulator, keeping things cool in the summer and warm in the winter.”
Construction projects often generate large amounts of excavated soil when workers dig foundations, basements, or parking structures. Much of that material ends up in landfills.
“Our study suggests that there are ways to reuse waste earth material onsite, and that could largely reduce the environmental footprint of construction,” Armistead said.
Because clay and sand are widely available, Srubar said the team’s findings could help builders around the world to tap into local resources.
“Clay and sand are among the most abundant building materials on Earth,” Srubar said. “The science and engineering we’re developing can be applied almost anywhere in the world.”
Bio-inspired 3D-printed earthen materials and structures by Samuel J. Armistead, Yierfan Maierdan, Olga B. Carcassi, Rebecca A. Mikofsky, Shiho Kawashima, Lola Ben-Alon & Wil V. Srubar III. Nature Communications volume 17, Article number: 5380 (2026) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71885-z Published: 18 April 2026 Version of record: 18 June 2026
This paper is open access.
The Columbia University researchers mentioned in the news release are associated with the Natural Materials Lab in Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The specific project is Earthen Rituals.
From a December 1, 2025 article by Matt Swayne for the Quantum Insider, Note: Links have been removed,
Insider Brief
DARPA has advanced 11 companies to Stage B of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative, moving the program from conceptual proposals to technical validation of utility-scale quantum computing architectures.
Stage B will evaluate each company’s R&D plans, risk-mitigation strategies, and prototype roadmaps to determine whether their approaches are realistic and scalable.
The initiative aims to assess whether an industrially useful quantum computer—one whose computational value exceeds its cost—can be developed by 2033.
What Does Stage B Mean for DARPA’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has moved its flagship quantum computing effort, the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI), into its next phase — or Stage B — a shift from conceptual review toward rigorous technical validation of utility-scale quantum architectures. A total of 11 companies have moved into Stage B, according to the DARPA project web page.
Under the initiative’s three-stage scheme, participants must first present a plausible architecture (Stage A), then a detailed R&D plan (Stage B), and finally undergo independent verification of hardware (Stage C).
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Which Companies Are Advancing to Stage B and What Qubit Technologies Do They Use?
DARPA reports the following companies (with their qubit technology approach) have been selected for Stage B at this time:
Company
Location
Qubit Approach
Atom Computing
Boulder Colorado
Neutral atom arrays
Diraq
Sydney and US locations
Silicon CMOS spin qubits
IBM
Yorktown Heights New York
Modular superconducting processors
IonQ
College Park Maryland
Trapped ions
Nord Quantique
Sherbrooke Canada
Superconducting qubits with bosonic correction
Photonic Inc.
Vancouver Canada
Optically linked silicon spin qubits
Quantinuum
Broomfield Colorado
Trapped ion QCCD architecture
Quantum Motion
London UK
MOS silicon spin qubits
QuEra Computing
Boston Massachusetts
Neutral atom arrays
Silicon Quantum Computing
Sydney Australia
Precision atom qubits in silicon
Xanadu
Toronto Canada
Photonic quantum computing
The list may grow, according to DARPA, adding that It is likely but not guaranteed that additional teams will enter Stage B in the future. DARPA plans to announce any additional promotion decisions once they contracted with those teams.
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Can a Useful Quantum Computer Be Developed by 2033?
By selecting multiple firms for Stage B, DARPA signals that it believes certain concepts presented in Stage A met the threshold of plausibility. The initiative’s ultimate goal is to assess whether an industrially-useful quantum computer can be developed by 2033 — defined as a system whose computational value outweighs its cost.
The move from conceptual review to rigorous validation suggests DARPA is narrowing focus from “could this work” to “can this be built.”
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What Will DARPA Evaluate During Stage B and How Will Firms Advance?
During Stage B (estimated to last about one year), DARPA will assess each performer’s R&D plan, prototype roadmap, risk-mitigation strategy and manufacturing pathway. After satisfactory review, select firms will proceed to Stage C, where independent verification and validation teams will test actual hardware against benchmarks.
Sense about Science and Taylor & Francis have announced the publication of a comprehensive research integrity toolkit, created with and for early career researchers (ECRs). The guide addresses common questions and provides practical advice to help today’s researchers avoid integrity pitfalls.
At a time when the trustworthiness of information is a question in all parts of society, good research practice faces additional challenges from AI tools and paper mills, as well as the impact of precarious employment and limited funding on the pressure to publish. ECRs can feel these pressures more acutely, making it essential they have confident knowledge of the principles of research integrity.
The toolkit is authored by Sense about Science and Taylor & Francis with input from the UK Research Integrity Office (UKRIO), guided by honest questions and experiences shared by early career researchers during co-creation workshops. The result is a comprehensive resource which meets the real needs of researchers at each stage of the research process, from initial design through research conduct and manuscript development to peer review and dissemination.
Tracey Brown, Director of Sense about Science, said: “Public trust in science has never been more important, or challenging. This toolkit explores the research integrity issues that early career researchers encounter, the steps to take and the principles that will help them evaluate new situations.”
Jason Hu, Director of Research Integrity Engagement at Taylor & Francis, said: “When you are starting out in your research career there is so much to learn about the requirements and expectations of ethical research practice that it can be quite overwhelming. We were therefore delighted to help demystify and simplify these complex issues through this new toolkit.”
Hu continued, “We hope the publication ethics section will be especially valuable, as it covers many of the questions we regularly receive, such as determining authorship credit, understanding what constitutes plagiarism, and knowing what happens if integrity concerns are raised about a published article. Although it has been designed for ECRs, I’m sure the toolkit will be a useful refresher for researchers at all career stages!”
The new resource can be found on the Taylor & Francis website: Research integrity: A toolkit for early career researchers and is available to download as a PDF from the Sense about Science website.
Caption: Ashwathi Menon, co-captain of UMBC’s Indian fusion dance team, helps demo some of the technology in the lab. Here, she demonstrates the Katakamukha mudra as a robotic hand mimics her gesture. Parthan Olikkal, a graduate student working on the project, is in the background. Credit: Brad Ziegler/UMBC
Researchers at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) have extracted the building blocks of precise hand gestures used in the classical Indian dance form Bharatanatyam—and found a richer ‘alphabet’ of movement compared to natural grasps. The work could improve how we teach hand movements to robots and offer humans better tools for physical therapy. The work was published online Nov. 24 [2025] in the journal Scientific Reports.
Ramana Vinjamuri, a professor at UMBC and lead researcher on the work, has focused his lab on understanding how the brain controls complex hand movements. More than a decade ago, he and his research partners began searching for and cataloguing the building blocks of hand motions, drawing on a concept called kinematic synergies, in which the brain simultaneously coordinates multiple joint movements to simplify complex motions. The concept can be used to deconstruct a dazzling diversity of movements into a limited number of fundamental units, similar to how the hundreds of thousands of different words in the English language can be broken down into only 26 letters.
Further inspiration struck when Vinjamuri attended a 2023 scientific conference on the brain, hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi in the serene foothills of the Himalayas. While brainstorming ideas for a session of the conference focused on ways that ancient Indian traditions might be applied to modern problems, Vinjamuri conceived a novel approach to deriving these building blocks—from the wide variety of precise hand gestures, called mudras, used in Indian classical dance to drive the storytelling element of the art form.
“We noticed dancers tend to age super gracefully: They remain flexible and agile because they have been training,” says Vinjamuri. “That was a huge inspiration for us when we started looking for richer alphabets of movement. With dance, we are looking not just at healthy movement, but super healthy. And so the question became, could we find a ‘superhuman’ alphabet from the dance gestures?”
Natural versus structured movements
As part of the newly published research, Vinjamuri and his students started by analyzing a data set of 30 natural hand grasps, used for picking up objects ranging in size from large water bottles to tiny beads. They found six synergies, akin to an alphabet of six letters, that when combined could account for nearly 99 percent of the variations in movements represented in the full data set.
Using the same techniques, the research team also analyzed 30 single-hand mudras. They found six synergies that could account for around 94 percent of the mudras’ variations.
Crucially, the team then tested how well the six natural grasp-derived synergies could combine to construct unrelated hand motions—in this case 15 letters of the American Sign Language alphabet—compared to the mudras-derived synergies. The mudra-derived synergies significantly outperformed the natural hand grasp synergies on that task.
“When we started this type of research more than 15 years ago, we wondered: Can we find a golden alphabet that can be used to reconstruct anything?” says Vinjamuri. “Now I highly doubt that there is such a thing. But the mudras-derived alphabet is definitely better than the natural grasp alphabet because there is more dexterity and more flexibility.”
Ultimately, Vinjamuri envisions coming up with libraries of task-specific alphabets that can be deployed depending on the needs, be it completing everyday household chores such as cooking or folding laundry, or something more complicated and precise, such as playing an instrument.
Robotic helping hands
The team is currently developing techniques to “teach” robotic hands the alphabets of movements and how to combine them to make new hand gestures. The approach marks a departure from standard techniques of teaching robots to mimic hand gestures, and toward a method rooted in our understanding of how the human body and brain work.
The researchers are testing the techniques on a stand-alone robotic hand and a humanoid robot, each of which operates in a different way and requires a unique approach to translating the mathematical representations of synergies into physical movements.
The team has also made great strides developing cost-effective and pragmatic methods of testing and implementing their ideas. They use a simple camera and software system to recognize, record, and analyze movements, an important contribution to ultimately making cost-effective technologies that people could use in their homes, such as a virtual system to coach people through physical therapy sessions, says Vinjamuri.
“Once I learned about synergies, I became so curious to see if we could use them to make a robotic hand respond and perform the same way as a human hand,” says Parthan Olikkal, a longtime member of Vinjamuri’s lab who is currently working toward his Ph.D in computer science. “Adding my own work to the research efforts, and seeing the results has been gratifying.”
Catherine Meyers’s December 15, 2025 article for the UMBC magazine provides a lot more detail along with embedded images,
Fossil records suggest that between four and six million years ago, the hominin ancestors of modern humans first stood up and walked on two legs—thus freeing their hands. Those hands went on to craft humanity’s story arc: cradling babies, carrying food, fashioning and wielding weapons, carving the woodblocks used to print the first paper books, running over the keys of a piano in a Rachmaninoff concerto, and even planting a flag on the surface of the moon.
“Hands are incredibly important to humans,” says Ramana Vinjamuri, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering whose work has focused on understanding how the brain controls complex hand movements.
Vinjamuri personally witnessed the debilitating impact of loss of hand movement when his mother suffered a stroke in 2014. “The very hand that taught me how to draw, how to write—I saw that hand irrevocably paralyzed. It was really hard for the family.”
The experience motivated Vinjamuri to work on technologies that could help people regain lost motor functions or serve as robotic replacements for injured body parts. As part of the research, the team began searching for and cataloging the building blocks of hand motions. Further inspiration struck when Vinjamuri attended a scientific conference on the brain, hosted by the Indian Institute of Technology Mandi in the serene foothills of the Himalayas. While brainstorming ideas for a session of the conference focused on ways that ancient Indian traditions might be applied to modern problems, Vinjamuri conceived a novel approach to deriving these building blocks—from the structured hand gestures of Indian classical dance.
A Complex and Versatile Instrument
Take a moment to consider your hands. Including the wrist, each hand has 27 joints. Some of those joints, such as the carpometacarpal joint at the base of the thumb, can move in multiple ways, such as rotating, bending, and moving toward or away from the center of the palm. The full hand encompasses billions of possible unique combinations of movements.
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Dance-Derived Alphabets of Movement
Ashwathi Menon demonstrates mudras, which are copied by an Inspire robotic hand. From top to bottom the mudras are: Ardhachandra, meaning “half moon;” Chandrakala, meaning “crescent moon;” and Tripataka, meaning “three parts of the flag.” The mudras can demonstrate various elements of a story, including weapons, trees, flowers, or concepts such as balance, unity, and beauty.. Courtesy: UMBC
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Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Reconstructing hand gestures with synergies extracted from dance movements by Parthan Olikkal, Chris Dollo, Akshara Ajendla, Ann Sofie Clemmensen & Ramana Vinjamuri. Scientific Reports volume 15, Article number: 41670 (2025) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-25563-7 Published: 24 November 2025 Version of record: 24 November 2025
A November 13, 2025 news item on Nanowerk announces work that could cut energy costs while removing airborne carbon dioxide, Note: Links have been removed,
A nanofiber air filter developed by the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (UChicago PME) could turn existing building ventilation into carbon-capture devices while cutting homeowners’ energy costs.
In a paper published in Science Advances (“Distributed direct air capture by carbon nanofiber air filters”), researchers from the lab of UChicago PME Asst. Prof. Po-Chun Hsu developed a distributed carbon nanofiber direct air capture (DAC) filter that could potentially turn every home, office, school or other building into a small carbon-capture system working toward the global problem of airborne CO2.
A life-cycle analysis shows that – even after factoring extra CO2 released by everything from manufacture and transportation to maintenance and disposal – the new filter is 92.1% efficient in removing carbon dioxide from the air.
“Every building already has ventilation systems that move large volumes of air every day. By integrating our carbon-capture filters into these systems, we can remove carbon directly from the air without building new plants or using extra land,” said first author Ronghui Wu, an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University who was a postdoctoral researcher in Hsu’s lab at the time of the research. “It’s a practical and scalable way to make carbon capture part of everyday infrastructure.”
On the largest possible level, replacing every building air filter with this new model could remove up to 596 megatonnes of carbon dioxide from the air – the equivalent of taking 130 million cars off the road for a year.
But on the individual level, every home, office or school that switch to DAC filters should expect lower energy bills. One study from 2024 indicated those savings could be up to 21.66%.
“Normally, air-conditioning systems need to pull in a lot of outside air to keep indoor carbon dioxide levels low,” Wu said. “Our filter removes carbon dioxide inside the building, so the system doesn’t have to bring in as much outside air. That means less air needs to be heated or cooled, which reduces the energy consumptions in HVAC.”
Regenerated by sunlight
Current direct air capture technologies are massive, corporate-owned affairs requiring major investments in land, power and other resources. Hsu likens it to solar power – a technology once confined to utility-owned solar farms, but now a network of large farms and small rooftop panels working toward the same energy goal.
“These rooftop panels are possible because sunlight is more or less uniform. The CO2 from air is similar,” Hsu said. “We propose, using experiment and computation to demonstrate, that indeed we could retrofit our buildings to be part of the decarbonization effort.”
Creating a practical, real-world filter is a balancing act. The UChicago PME team had to ensure that the filter removes more CO2 from the air than the amount added by manufacturing, transporting, installing, maintaining and eventually disposing of the filters.
The team’s carbon nanofiber–based polyethylenimine (PEI) material would create a reusable filter that could slot into existing HVAC systems, similar to the air-purifying high efficiency particulate arresting (HEPA) filters. Unlike HEPA filters, which head to landfills as garbage every six months to a year, the carbon-capture filters would have the CO2 removed regularly and be returned to service.
Hsu and Wu envision an ecosystem where municipal waste management systems haul off the filters weekly with the garbage and recycling.
“They would have these saturated filters from household ventilation systems and commercial buildings, then replace them with new ones,” Hsu said. “They’d ship the saturated one to a centralized facility to dissolve the CO2 or make it into highly concentrated CO2 to capture or, even better, convert to high-value chemicals or fuel.”
The new material was specifically designed to show excellent solar absorptivity. This means the CO2 can be removed from a saturated filter through solar thermal methods – including literally leaving the filter out under the sun.
“It has to be able to regenerate using renewable energy,” Hsu said. “The most common way to regenerate CO2 with solvent, is by heating it up. If you burn fossil fuels to heat up the solvent, then you will probably end up emitting more carbon dioxide than you capture.”
While the global benefits would rise as more places adopt the filter, lower energy bills aren’t the only benefits an individual would see from installing a direct air capture filter.
“This kind of air filter can also improve indoor air quality, especially in places like classrooms and offices where many people share the same space,” Wu said. “By keeping indoor carbon dioxide levels low, it helps people stay more alert, focused, and healthy.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Distributed direct air capture by carbon nanofiber air filters by Ronghui Wu, Hernan E. Delgado, Yi Xie, Yuanke Chen, Gangbin Yan, Edward Luo, Qizhang Li, Qingsong Fan, Yu Han, Genesis M. Higueros, Amar Ruthen, Chenxi Sui, Adarsh Suresh, David B. Mitzi, Chong Liu, Amgad Elgowainy, and Po-Chun Hsu. Science Advances 17 Oct 2025 Vol 11, Issue 42 DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adv6846
What is going on with article accelerators these days? I have two stories, one from the US about a room-size accelerator that is commercially available and a story from Japan about work on a desktop-sized particle accelerator for a future iteration.
Starting with the room-sized particle accelerators
Charles Q. Choi’s December 4, 2025 article for IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Spectrum profiles the work on a more compact particle accelerator, Note: Links have been removed,
Particle accelerators are usually huge structures—think of the 3.2-kilometer–long SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, Calif. But scientists have been hard at work trying to shrink these accelerators down by using lasers to perform the accelerating. These particle accelerators would be the size of single room, and cost much less as well. Now, a startup says its laser-powered accelerator, the first commercial version of such a device, has successfully accelerated a beam of electrons. These could first be used in radiation tests of electronics designed for satellites and spacecraft.
The concept behind the new device was first detailed in 1979. An extremely powerful and ultrashort laser pulse strikes a gas, producing a plasma. The plasma oscillates in the laser’s wake, and electrons are dragged along in the plasma’s path, accelerating them to relativistic speeds.
These “wakefield accelerators“ can generate acceleration fields up to 1,000 times as great as what conventional particle colliders are capable of. Scientists have long suggested that wakefield accelerators could shrink kilometer-scale facilities to the size of a room or smaller.
“Democratization is the name of the game for us,” says Björn Manuel Hegelich, founder and CEO of TAU Systems in Austin, Texas. “We want to get these incredible tools into the hands of the best and brightest and let them do their magic.”
TAU has now successfully generated electron beams using its commercial laser-powered wakefield accelerator. “Laser-powered accelerators have been around in academic labs for more than 20 years,” Hegelich says. “What’s most exciting is that until now, they haven’t been available as tools for industry. This result is a major step to change that paradigm and make compact accelerators useful for the world outside of academia.”
The new accelerator uses a laser supplied by the Thales Group in France, which TAU notes displays exceptional stability. “The goal here is to focus on reliability and reproducibility rather than record performance,” Hegelich says.
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TAU’s first commercial accelerator will be deployed at the startup’s facility in Carlsbad, Calif., which will operate as a showroom for customers to become familiar with the technology. TAU plans to offer use of its accelerator to commercial and government customers starting in 2026.
“This first commercial system will operate in the range of 60 to 100 million electron volts (MeVs) at 100 hertz with capacity to upgrade to higher energies in the future,” Hegelich says. “We’re not rushing to the highest energies yet because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in the 100 to 1,000 MeV range, where conventional accelerators are too large to be of practical use.” For comparison, the linear accelerator at SLAC can achieve electron energies up to 50 billion electron volts.
Saúl Morales Rodriguéz’s April 2, 2026 posting on the lifeboat.com blog describes work from a Japanese research team into shrinking particle accelerators even further, Note: A link has been removed,
Using high-intensity lasers, researchers have taken an important step toward miniaturization of particle accelerators by demonstrating free-electron laser amplification at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (27–50 nm), with an acceleration length of only a few millimeters. By generating high-quality, monoenergetic electron beams (i.e. beams where all the electrons have nearly the same energy), they have achieved a key milestone toward compact accelerator technologies.
The work is published in the journal Physical Review Research.
Researchers at The University of Osaka have hit a vital milestone toward creating tabletop x-ray lasers, with the goal of building ultracompact high-energy electron accelerators.
Summary Free-electron lasers can be tuned to operate over a wide range of wavelengths, but they conventionally require large-scale facilities. Researchers from The University of Osaka show that laser wakefield acceleration can dramatically miniaturize this technology by improving plasma stability and electron beam quality. Their study demonstrates such lasers in the extreme ultraviolet, with the ultimate goal of further refining the technology to operate at x-ray wavelengths.
Osaka, Japan – Using high-intensity lasers, researchers have taken an important step towards miniaturization of particle accelerators by demonstrating free-electron laser amplification at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths (27–50 nm), with an acceleration length of only a few millimeters. By generating high-quality, monoenergetic electron beams (i.e. beams where all the electrons have nearly the same energy), they have achieved a key milestone toward compact accelerator technologies.
The research team led by The University of Osaka’s Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research (SANKEN) in collaboration with Kansai Institute for Photon Science (KPSI), National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST), RIKEN SPring-8 Center (RSC), High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), used a technique called laser wakefield acceleration to create plasma waves that generate extremely strong accelerating electric fields, thanks to waves within the plasma that travel at almost the speed of light. These potent electric fields are more than 1000 times as strong as conventional accelerators.
Our work has made several substantial improvements over previous techniques, allowing us to achieve free-electron laser amplification at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths,” says lead author Zhan Jin. “We have used laser pulse shaping to improve focusing accuracy. When combined with our specially developed supersonic gas nozzles, we can create more stable wavefronts, enabling precise control of the plasma source.”
Using free-electron laser amplification in this way is essential for reducing the distance required to accelerate electrons. Conventional systems can require hundreds of meters, but the powerful fields generated by laser wakefield acceleration can potentially reduce this to just millimeters. These results show that laser wakefield acceleration is approaching the performance required of practical, high-quality electron accelerators. Demonstrating this at extreme ultraviolet wavelengths is an important milestone, but the research team intends to push this even further.
“Laser wakefield acceleration has long been considered impractical, because of the difficulty in stabilizing the plasma it relies on,” explains senior author Tomonao Hosokai. “We have greatly enhanced the stability and quality of our electron beams, which will allow us to dramatically miniaturize future accelerators, opening the possibility to create compact x-ray free-electron lasers.” This work shows that laser wakefield acceleration can perform on par with practical high-quality high-energy electron accelerators.
Demonstrating free-electron laser operation in the extreme ultraviolet range is a crucial first step toward extending the technology to shorter wavelengths, ultimately enabling compact x-ray free-electron lasers. These exceptionally powerful light sources generate coherent x-rays 10 billion times brighter than the sun and produce ultrashort femtosecond pulses. Their use is currently restricted to large facilities, but miniaturization of these lasers would allow their use in conventional laboratories. Currently, laser wakefield acceleration is one of the most promising ways to accomplish this. The work accomplished by the research team to stabilize the plasma these accelerators rely on is an essential step toward this goal.
Desktop-sized instruments are essential in day-to-day research, and developing compact accelerators and x-ray free-electron lasers will enable advances across fields such as life sciences, materials science, semiconductor development, and quantum science. Constructing desktop-sized accelerators would allow small labs to perform research that currently requires large-scale accelerator facilities.
