AI-powered smart bandage heals wounds 25% faster

A new wearable device, a-Heal, combines AI, imaging, and bioelectronics to speed up wound recovery. It continuously monitors wounds, diagnoses healing stages, and applies personalized treatments like medicine or electric fields. Preclinical tests showed healing about 25% faster than standard care, highlighting potential for chronic wound therapy.

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Tiny new lenses, smaller than a hair, could transform phone and drone cameras

Scientists have developed a new multi-layered metalens design that could revolutionize portable optics in devices like phones, drones, and satellites. By stacking metamaterial layers instead of relying on a single one, the team overcame fundamental limits in focusing multiple wavelengths of light. Their algorithm-driven approach produced intricate nanostructures shaped like clovers, propellers, and squares, enabling improved performance, scalability, and polarization independence.

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Shocking study exposes widespread math research fraud

A sweeping investigation has revealed widespread fraud in mathematics publishing, where commercial metrics and rankings have incentivized the mass production of meaningless or flawed papers. The study highlights shocking distortions—such as a university without a math department ranked as having the most top mathematicians—and the explosion of megajournals willing to publish anything for a fee.

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Cosmic simulations that once needed supercomputers now run on a laptop

Astronomers have long relied on supercomputers to simulate the immense structure of the Universe, but a new tool called Effort.jl is changing that. By mimicking the behavior of complex cosmological models, this emulator delivers results with the same accuracy — and sometimes even finer detail — in just minutes on a standard laptop. The breakthrough combines neural networks with clever use of physical knowledge, cutting computation time dramatically while preserving reliability.

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Boosting the popularity of social media posts

Computer scientists created a new algorithm to recommend tags for social media posts which should boost the popularity of the post in question. This algorithm takes into account more kinds of information than previous algorithms with a similar goal. The result is a measurably improved view count for posts which use the tags recommended by this new algorithm. Such research could be useful commercially and for other researchers who study online behavior.

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Browser tool aims to help researchers ID malicious websites, code

Researchers have developed an open-source tool that allows users to track and record the behavior of JavaScript programs without alerting the websites that run those programs. The tool, called VisibleV8, runs in the Chrome browser and is designed to detect malicious programs that are capable of evading existing malware detection systems.

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Machine learning's next frontier: Epigenetic drug discovery

Scientists have developed a machine-learning algorithm that gleans information from microscope images — allowing for high-throughput epigenetic drug screens that could unlock new treatments for cancer, heart disease, mental illness and more.

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Giving robots a faster grasp

Engineers have found a way to significantly speed up the planning process required for a robot to adjust its grasp on an object by pushing that object against a stationary surface. Whereas traditional algorithms would require tens of minutes for planning out a sequence of motions, the new team's approach shaves this planning process down to less than a second.

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