Future Technology[Daily Briefing] 🔬 A lab shrunk onto one chip, 🛡️ 570 Microsoft fixes, 🎧 tool pick
A terahertz lab just got shrunk onto a single chip
Terahertz waves sit in the awkward gap between microwaves and infrared light. They can see through cardboard, clothing and skin without the radiation risk of X-rays, they can carry data far faster than 5G, and physicists have been excited about them for about thirty years. The catch has always been the hardware. Generating and detecting terahertz signals took a bench full of bulky, temperamental kit, which is why the technology mostly stayed in labs.
UCLA engineers have now put the whole thing on one semiconductor chip. Writing in Nature Communications, the team used quantum well structures, ultrathin engineered layers that steer light with atomic precision, to generate, detect, modulate and amplify terahertz signals in a single integrated package. The clever part is that these structures are already used in photonic integrated circuits, so this is not an exotic new material that needs a decade of fab work. It leans on manufacturing that already exists.
The obvious applications are ultrafast wireless links, security screening, remote sensing and medical imaging that does not involve ionising anything. The less obvious one is that a chip-scale terahertz source makes it plausible to put this capability in something you carry, rather than something you wheel into a room.
Why it matters: Terahertz has been stuck at the demo stage because the equipment cost six figures and filled a bench. Moving it onto a standard semiconductor process is the same shift that took lasers from lab curiosity to the thing reading barcodes at Tesco. Expect the first real products in security scanning and short-range wireless, not consumer gadgets, and expect them to take five years rather than one.
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Quick hits
Microsoft patched 570 flaws in one go. July's Patch Tuesday is the biggest on record, including two zero-days already being exploited and one publicly disclosed before the fix landed. If you manage anything Windows, this is not a "next week" job. Our take | BleepingComputer, 4 min read
SonicWall SMA1000 is under active attack. Two zero-days, CVE-2026-15409 and CVE-2026-15410, one of them a perfect CVSS 10.0 server-side request forgery. Attackers are already using both. Our take | Security Affairs, 3 min read
A ransomware crew went from break-in to encryption in under 24 hours. The group, calling itself Spirals, compressed an entire corporate intrusion, including data theft, into a single day. The old assumption that you have days to spot an intruder is looking generous. Our take | The Hacker News, 4 min read
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Spanish police dismantled a €140 million fraud ring. Investment scams and business email compromise, run as an organised money-laundering operation. BEC remains the most boring and most profitable attack in the book. Our take | Security Affairs, 3 min read
Tool of the day: Soundcore Space One Pro
An honest take: these are not the best-sounding headphones you can buy, and the adaptive noise cancelling is a step behind Sony and Bose at full price. What they are is roughly half the money for about eighty percent of the result, with a genuinely clever folding hinge that makes them the flattest ANC over-ears I have packed. The 60 hour battery means you stop thinking about charging, and LDAC support is there if you care about it. If you want quiet on a train without spending £350, this is the sensible pick.
One question for you today: if a terahertz scanner could see through your bag from ten metres away without you knowing, is that a security win or a privacy problem? Hit reply, I read every one.
Nath, Future Technology
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