Canadian authorities have arrested three men for operating an “SMS blaster” device that pretends to be a cellular tower to send phishing texts to nearby phones.
Such tools trick devices into connecting to them by emitting signals that mimic a legitimate tower. Mobile phones in its range automatically link to them as there is stronger reception.
Once the connection is established, the operators of these rogue cellular base stations can push SMS messages directly to connected devices, which appear to come from trusted entities such as banks or the government.
“An SMS blaster works by mimicking a legitimate cellular tower. When nearby phones connect to it, users receive fraudulent text messages that appear to come from trusted organizations,” explains the police.
“These messages often prompt recipients to click on links that lead to fake websites designed to capture personal information, including banking credentials and passwords.”
No phone numbers are required for these messages to be sent; only that the targets be within range. In densely populated areas, this practically means mass distribution, and hence the name “blaster.”
The Canadian authorities noted that this is the first time that such a device has been spotted in the country.
The Toronto Police said the investigation, dubbed ‘Project Lighthouse,’ began in November 2025 after receiving tips about suspicious activity in downtown Toronto.
Police found that the equipment was operated from vehicles, allowing it to move across the Greater Toronto Area and target large numbers of people.
The investigators believe that during the SMS blaster’s operation, 13 million cases of mobile network entrapment occurred.
Besides the phishing aspect, devices connected to those rogue stations are temporarily disconnected from their provider’s legitimate network and cannot reach emergency services if needed.
The police conducted searches in Markham and Hamilton on March 31, and seized multiple SMS blasters and other electronic devices.
Two suspects were arrested, while a third man turned himself in on April 21.
To defend against rogue towers, users are recommended to disable 2G downgrades on Android, although this measure is not effective against more advanced setups targeting LTE/5G signaling.
SMS should be treated as an insecure channel, and users should avoid following links received over this channel.
For sensitive data or communication exchanges, the recommendation is to use end-to-end encrypted channels.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
All HDMI cables support high-definition outputs, but not all can actually support full 4K resolutions. If you want to make the most of your 4K TV or monitor, you’ll need to make sure you have the right HDMI cable to set it up. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself stuck at a lower resolution regardless of the visual quality of what you’re trying to watch or play.
It’s not always immediately obvious what your HDMI cable is capable of. However, there are a few things to know, and a couple of things that you can look out for to help you get to the bottom of things. For starters, you can check which generation your HDMI cable belongs to. HDMI cables can only output at 4K if they’re from generation 1.4 or later. Your best bet for checking this is your cable’s packaging or any proof of purchase, which will typically label exactly which generation your HDMI cable belongs to. Look out for cables labeled with 1.4 or above, and especially for HDMI cables labeled with 2.0 or 2.1.
Don’t despair if you don’t have the packaging or proof of purchase lying around. If you look closely at the cable itself, most reputable brands print the speed rating directly on the rubber jacket. To get 4K output, look for cables with the words ‘High Speed’ (which aligns with HDMI 1.4 capabilities), ‘Premium High Speed’ (HDMI 2.0), or ‘Ultra High Speed’ (HDMI 2.1) printed along the wire. Or, if you bought your HDMI cable at any point since 2009 and it wasn’t secondhand, there’s a very good chance it can output up to 4K resolution when connected to the right device since HDMI 1.4 launched around then.
You could easily assume that all HDMI cables and ports are created roughly equally. After all, they all have broadly the same purposes: to transmit video and audio information. However, it’s not that simple. Since HDMI launched back in 2002, it has received a long list of specification updates that have tweaked the connection and cable capabilities to allow for higher definitions, faster frame rates, and new features.
Choosing the right HDMI cable for your 4K TV or monitor is important for achieving the best experience possible, and one way to do that is by being selective about which generation of cable you use. HDMI generations are linear, meaning the newer the generation — and in turn, the higher the number associated with it — the better quality the image is. So, it’s a good rule of thumb when buying a new HDMI cable to grab the newest generation option available to you.
Even though 1.4 can output at 4K, it’s worth looking for a 2.0 or 2.1 HDMI cable if possible, as they can support higher refresh rates at 4K than their predecessors can. HDMI 2.0 cables support 4K at 60 Hz, while 2.1 cables can output 4K at 120 Hz, assuming your device supports it. Meanwhile, 1.4 cables can only output 4K at 30 Hz for standard UHD TVs. Higher frame rates can make videos look smoother by showing more images per second, in turn improving the overall picture quality and helping your 4K visuals shine.
A new wave of the Glassworm campaign is targeting the OpenVSX ecosystem with 73 “sleeper” extensions that turn malicious after an update.
Six of the extensions have been activated and deliver malware, while researchers assess with high confidence that the rest of them are dormant or at least suspicious.
When initially uploaded, the extensions are benign but deliver the payload at a later stage, revealing the attacker’s true intention.
“This count may change as new updates continue to appear, but the pattern is consistent with earlier GlassWorm waves,” say researchers at application security company Socket.
GlassWorm is an ongoing supply chain attack campaign first observed in October, initially using invisible Unicode characters to hide malicious code that steals cryptocurrency wallets and developer credentials.
It has since expanded across multiple ecosystems, including GitHub repositories, npm packages, and both the Visual Studio Code Marketplace and OpenVSX. They have also been observed to target macOS users with trojanized crypto wallet clients.
A recent wave in mid-March 2026 showed significant scale, affecting hundreds of repositories and dozens of extensions.
However, operations of such a scale can be noisy and leave multiple traces, as multiple distinct research teams caught the activity early and helped block it.
The latest wave suggests that the attacker’s intent is to change their strategy by submitting innocuous extensions to a single ecosystem and introducing the malicious payload in a subsequent update, rather than embedding it in the extensions.
Socket has found that the 73 extensions involved in the most recent GlassWorm campaign are clones of legitimate listings, designed to trick developers who do not pay much attention beyond visuals.
In one case, the attacker used the same icon as the legitimate extension, adopted a similar naming and description. Although there are subtle differences, the main indicators are the name of the publisher and the unique identifier.
Instead of carrying the malware, the extensions now act as thin loaders that fetch it via one of the following methods:
Socket did not provide technical details about the newest payload. Previously, these attacks were aimed at stealing cryptocurrency wallet data, credentials, access tokens, SSH keys, and developer environment data.
The cybersecurity company has published the full list of the 73 extensions believed to be part of the latest GlassWorm wave. Developers who installed any of them are recommended to rotate all secrets and clean their environment.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
The developers are urging all developers who installed version 0.23.3 to take the following steps immediately:
1. Check your installed version:
pip show elementary-data | grep Version2. If the version is 0.23.3, uninstall it and replace it with the safe version:
pip uninstall elementary-data
pip install elementary-data==0.23.4In your requirements and lockfiles, pin explicitly to elementary-data==0.23.4.
3. Delete your cache files to avoid any artifacts.
4. Check for the malware’s marker file on any machine where the CLI may have run: If this file is present, the payload executed on that machine.
macOS / Linux: /tmp/.trinny-security-update
Windows: %TEMP%\\.trinny-security-update5. Rotate any credentials that were accessible from the environment where 0.23.3 ran – dbt profiles, warehouse credentials, cloud provider keys, API tokens, SSH keys, and the contents of any .env files. CI/CD runners are especially exposed because they typically have broad sets of secrets mounted at runtime.
6. Contact your security team to hunt for unauthorized usage of exposed credentials. The relevant IOCs are at the bottom of this post.
Over the past decade, supply-chain attacks on open source repositories have become increasingly common. In some cases, they have achieved a chain of compromises as the malicious package leads to breaches of users and, from there, breaches resulting from the compromise of the users’ environments.
HD Moore, a hacker with more than four decades of experience and the founder and CEO of runZero, said that user-developed repository workflows, such as GitHub actions, are notorious for hosting vulnerabilities.
It’s a “a major problem for open source projects with open repos,” he said. “It’s really hard to not accidentally create dangerous workflows that can be exploited by an attacker’s pull request.”
He said this package can be used to check for such vulnerabilities.
When building a project to operate on battery power for long periods of time, having a microcontroller with a reliable and extremely low-power sleep mode is critical. When processing power isn’t needed, it should be able to wait around using almost no energy until an interrupt triggers it. Once triggered, the CPU performs its tasks and then puts itself right back to sleep, making sure the battery lasts as long as possible. Unfortunately, not every microcontroller has sleep capabilities or has an acceptably low level of power use for maximizing battery life. For these systems, a tool like this power manager might come in handy.
The small PCB, called the powerTimer, essentially acts as a middleman for power delivery to another microcontroller. On the PCB is an RV3028-C7 real-time clock, which uses a mere 45 nA of current and can interact with the second microcontroller through a timer or alarm. When commanded, the powerTimer uses an SR latch as its main control circuit, allowing single button presses to change the power state for the second microcontroller. Once the powerTimer powers up the second microcontroller, that microcontroller can communicate back to the powerTimer with a “DONE” signal, and once this signal is received, the powerTimer will cut power and wait for the next interrupt to occur.
The project’s creator, [Juan], had this idea for an ESP32 with a camera module. While it does have a sleep mode, the ESP32 wasn’t nearly low-power enough to get the battery life that he wanted. With a modular system like this, it can be used in many other applications as well. PowerTimer is one of the entries in our 2026 Green Powered Challenge.
High-end audio brands have spent the past five years pushing deeper into the luxury car market, usually leaning on bigger speaker counts and brand-name partnerships. Dirac is taking a different route. In partnership with NIO, it has launched Dirac Spaces, a new software platform designed to model and reproduce the acoustic characteristics of real-world environments inside a vehicle. The system debuts in the NIO ES9 alongside the Lyra sound system, marking a shift toward software-defined acoustics rather than hardware-led upgrades.
From there, the through line becomes clearer. Dirac has been working this angle for a while. Its automotive push builds on earlier technologies like Reference Room Mode and Dirac Dimensions in the ES8, and traces back to the introduction of its Virtuo platform in 2022. The focus hasn’t changed: control the acoustics of the space, don’t just decorate it with DSP.
Some car audio systems still try to fake spaciousness by layering on reverb and calling it a day. Dirac’s approach is more precise. By modeling how sound reflects and decays in both the vehicle and a target environment, it uses the full speaker system to create a more coherent three-dimensional sound field.
Timing on this one was almost too convenient. The press release landed while I was out this morning driving the 2026 Mazda CX-50 Turbo and the 2026 Mazda CX-5 Premium—ended up ordering the CX-5. Both come with “premium” Bose systems. They’re competent, and the cabins are quiet enough, but spatial audio isn’t part of the equation.
Apple CarPlay integration matters more day-to-day anyway, especially in a house full of iPhones where Qobuz is non-negotiable and nobody else is touching the car stereo. But even in a well-insulated cabin, you can hear the limits. The sense of space is mostly surface-level.
That’s the gap Dirac is trying to close; less about adding features, more about fixing how sound actually behaves inside the car.
BMW also announced its first vehicle this week with Dolby Atmos, which is firmly in the “nice to hear about, not buying anytime soon” category — but it’s another sign of where this is headed in the luxury automobile segment.
Working alongside the NIO Lyra sound system, Dirac is taking a system-level approach to in-car audio that goes beyond hardware tuning. The goal here is straightforward: control how sound behaves inside the cabin rather than simply pushing more of it through more speakers. That means combining the vehicle’s audio system, the physical space, and the source material into something that behaves in a more predictable and consistent way.
Dirac Spaces is the next step in that process. Instead of treating the car as a fixed listening environment, it uses acoustic modeling and real-time signal processing to reshape how sound is perceived inside the cabin. The system measures both the vehicle and a target acoustic space, then applies Dirac’s MIMO sound field control to approximate how that space would actually sound. The idea is not to layer on effects, but to replicate the acoustic behavior of different environments with a higher degree of accuracy than traditional DSP approaches.
“Today, cars are one of the most important listening environments, but they’ve traditionally been limited by the physical constraints of the cabin,” said Anders Storm. “With Dirac Spaces, we are redefining the in-car listening experience by recreating the acoustic signature of real-world environments inside the vehicle.”
Dirac is also giving automakers some flexibility in how this is deployed. “Signature Spaces” allows OEM partners like NIO to create branded environments tied to specific venues or experiences. “Designed Spaces” are Dirac’s own presets, based on measured real-world environments, with options like Balanced Room, Warm Stage, and Grand Hall that adjust both spatial cues and tonal balance.
The distinction from typical sound modes is important. This isn’t just reverb layered on top of the signal. Dirac Spaces maps how reflections and spatial cues should behave based on the car’s speaker layout and acoustic characteristics, which results in a more coherent sound field. In practice, that should translate into better depth, clearer imaging, and fewer of the phase and timing issues that tend to show up in complex cabin environments.
Implementation is also relatively clean. Dirac Spaces runs on top of an already optimized Dirac system, so it doesn’t require additional measurement beyond what’s used to tune the vehicle in the first place. It supports both stereo and multichannel content, which keeps things consistent regardless of source.
In the context of modern EV platforms, this is really about software. By integrating Dirac Spaces into vehicles like the ES9, NIO is using audio as another layer of differentiation—one that can be updated, refined, and potentially monetized over time without changing the underlying hardware.
“At NIO, we’re focused on creating a more immersive in-car experience that goes beyond traditional expectations,” said Ted Li. “With Dirac Spaces, the goal is to move the vehicle beyond a standard listening environment and closer to a space where sound behaves more like it would in the real world.”
Dirac will demonstrate Dirac Spaces publicly for the first time at Auto China 2026, running April 24 through May 3, in collaboration with NIO. The demonstrations will take place inside production vehicles, showing how the system adapts across different cabin designs and audio system configurations.
Dirac is attacking the real problem in car audio: the cabin itself. Dirac Spaces isn’t another sound mode—it’s an attempt to model and control how audio behaves in that space, which is a fundamentally different approach from the DSP presets and upmixing most systems rely on today.
North American availability is still an open question. With NIO as the launch partner and no U.S. presence, this rollout is likely tied to future OEM deals rather than anything immediate.
The rivalry is more complicated than a simple “they don’t need Dirac” narrative. NIO is leaning into Dirac as a core technology partner, while Tesla and Rivian continue to prioritize in-house control.
Meanwhile, Dirac is driving innovation. At CES 2025, Dirac and Denon showcased a prototype 22-speaker sound system in Tesla Model Y with height channels, headrest and headliner exciters, and Dirac’s spatial processing to create a far more coherent sound field than the stock system.
It wasn’t just louder or wider. It delivered noticeably better clarity, more stable imaging, and more natural bass response, while generating immersive spatial audio from standard stereo sources without relying on Atmos mixes.
It also exposed the core difference in approach. Tesla’s system, like Rivian’s evolving in-house platform relies on upmixing and DSP layered on top of the cabin. Dirac’s approach focuses on getting all the speakers to work together, correcting timing, phase, and interaction so the cabin itself stops fighting the sound.
That puts NIO in a different lane. By integrating Dirac at a deeper level with Spaces, it’s betting that software-defined acoustics can outperform even well-executed in-house systems. Tesla and Rivian are betting they can get there on their own.
Right now, both approaches work. But based on what we heard in that Model Y, Dirac has already shown it can raise the bar—if an automaker is willing to give it the keys.
For more information: https://www.dirac.com/b2b/automotive/spaces
The model in question is a toggle, which is the commonly seen plastic or metal device that clamps down on e.g. rope or cord and requires you to push on it to have it release said clamping force. Normally these use a metal spring inside, but this version is fully 3D printable and thus forms a practical way to test this particular compliant mechanism with a variety of materials.
The internal spring is a printed spiral spring, with the example in the video printed in PETG. You can of course also print it in other materials for different durability and springiness properties. As noted in the video, PLA makes for a very poor spring material, so you probably want to skip that one.
We covered compliant mechanisms in the past for purposes like blasters, including some that you can only see under a microscope.
Yash Jain discusses how cybersecurity needs to be an institutional ‘fundamental component’, not a ‘compliance checkbox’.
For Yash Jain, a cybersecurity, forensics and privacy manager at PwC, Ireland’s cybersecurity landscape is “evolving rapidly as awareness grows following targeted cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure, such as the Health Service Executive (HSE) and pharmaceutical companies”.
He told SiliconRepublic.com: “These incidents highlight the importance of cybersecurity in modern digital infrastructure, prompting both government and private sectors to prioritise security as a fundamental component, rather than a mere compliance checkbox.”
Cybersecurity awareness is widespread, yet many struggle with the practical steps needed to protect both organisations and individuals from cyberthreats. The primary challenge lies in crafting a security strategy that aligns with business goals and compliance requirements. Cybersecurity isn’t just about adopting automated tools or running awareness campaigns. It’s about selecting a strategy that effectively implements protective measures across both people, process and technology. Additionally, skill shortage is another challenge that this sector is facing at this stage. Finding the right talent to deal with security and this has been a key challenge.
In the current cybersecurity environment, mitigating skills shortages demands a strong grasp of networking concepts and familiarity with foundational development tools, including APIs and commonly used scripting and web technologies. These core skills enable professionals to understand how systems communicate, identify vulnerabilities and effectively analyse and respond to cyberthreats.
This knowledge lays the groundwork for understanding complex technical concepts. Pursuing globally recognised certifications like Certified Information Systems Professional (CISSP) and Certified Information System Auditor (CISA) can further enhance their security expertise. This approach equips professionals to navigate the evolving challenges in cybersecurity. Additionally, leveraging AI to develop these skills offers a modern alternative to traditional learning methods, such as sifting through extensive books.
To build a robust cybersecurity culture, organisations should make sure their teams understand the impact of cybersecurity on both them and the organisation. Education should be straightforward and clear, especially for those in non-IT roles like HR, finance and operations. Engage your workforce with interactive sessions, such as in-person training and large-scale phishing simulation exercises. These simulations, managed by your security team or a trusted third party, involve sending fake phishing emails to employees to test their ability to spot and handle phishing attempts – without any real threat to the organisation.
And back to basics, it’s crucial to maintain basic security practices, avoid sharing passwords, refrain from writing them down on desks or laptop covers and don’t use corporate email addresses for personal activities like gym memberships. By fostering these habits, you can enhance your organisation’s cybersecurity resilience.
Cross-collaboration is critical to building a resilient cybersecurity posture. Cybersecurity is no longer solely the responsibility of the IT or security team, it is an organisational concern that touches every department and individual. When teams across HR, legal, finance, operations and technology work without collaboration, it creates blind spots that threat actors can easily exploit. Effective collaboration ensures that threat intelligence is shared swiftly across the right teams, enabling faster detection and response to incidents. For example, during a ransomware attack, a coordinated response between the security team, senior leadership, legal counsel and communications is essential to minimise damage and maintain compliance obligations.
It is essential that organisations take concrete measures to sustain and strengthen their current state of effective collaboration and consequently consider moving away from traditional cyber assessment exercises, such as conventional penetration testing. Instead, they should shift their focus towards purple team exercises. A purple team exercise is an advanced cyber penetration testing assessment in which penetration testers simulate sophisticated cyberattacks to evaluate an organisation’s security maturity across people, processes and technology, with the objective of detecting and blocking potential cyberthreats.
Absolutely. There are a few misconceptions I frequently encounter that I think are worth addressing. The first is that cybersecurity is purely a technical role. While technical knowledge is certainly valuable, a large part of what I do involves strategic thinking, risk assessment and communicating threats in a way that non-technical stakeholders can understand and act upon. You do not need to be a programmer to have a meaningful and impactful career in this space.
The second myth is that cybersecurity is only a concern for large organisations. In my experience, small and medium-sized businesses are often more vulnerable precisely because they are assumed to be low-risk and therefore invest less in their defences. Attackers are very aware of this.
The third and perhaps most dangerous myth is that having the right tools means you are protected. Technology is only one layer of defence. Some of the most damaging breaches I have seen were not the result of a technical failure, they happened because a person clicked a link they should not have, or shared credentials without realising the consequences.
My advice is simple: start with curiosity and never stop learning. Begin by building a solid foundation in networking and IT fundamentals, and consider pursuing recognised certifications such as CompTIA Security+, CISSP, or CISA depending on your area of interest. Do not be discouraged if your background is not in traditional IT, as some of the most effective professionals in this field come from diverse backgrounds such as law, business and psychology, because soft skills like communication, critical thinking and problem-solving are just as valuable as technical expertise.
We have witnessed such scenarios where people coming from diverse educational backgrounds like business studies, law and other non-tech courses followed the above approach and enabled them as competent cyber professionals. PwC provides tailored learning programmes bespoke for employees joining the firm from different backgrounds to achieve this goal. The learning path is aligned to develop individuals into cybersecurity professionals capable of managing routine governance, risk and compliance tasks to maintain an organisation’s cybersecurity posture. However, to gain further depth in this career, specifically to become an offensive security engineer additional skills are required.
Leverage AI-driven learning tools and online platforms to accelerate your development rather than relying solely on traditional methods. Most importantly, engage with the wider cybersecurity community through events, forums and networking opportunities, as this field thrives on collaboration and knowledge sharing and those who embrace that will always stay ahead.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
If you had trouble logging into your email today, you’re not the only one. Microsoft Outlook users reported problems signing in to the email client at the start of the week, with reports beginning just before 5 a.m. ET Monday.
After several hours of login issues, a fix has now been reported. The company said around 3:36 p.m. ET that internal logs tied the issue to a recent configuration change and that it rolled back the update. A recent status report said the service appeared to be recovering.
Microsoft said users on iPhones might have to reenter their passwords in Settings to access Outlook accounts again.
On Monday, Microsoft reported on its status page that people logging into Outlook.com might experience intermittent failures, including “too many requests” issues. Others may have found themselves unexpectedly signed out. The company tracked repeated efforts to fix the errors on its status page and the Microsoft 365 Status X account.
“We’re working to mitigate an issue that may cause some users to experience intermittent Outlook.com sign‑in failures on mobile apps,” a Microsoft spokesperson told CNET in an email Monday morning.
People reporting errors to Downdetector, which, like CNET, is owned by Ziff Davis, said they were having issues with the client’s iOS app. Outage reports peaked at about 1,500 early in the day.
This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering.
The traditional approach to academic research goes something like this: Assemble experts from a discipline, put them in a building, and hope something useful emerges. Biology departments do biology. Engineering departments do engineering. Medical schools treat patients.
NYU is turning that model inside out. At its new Institute for Engineering Health, the organizing principle centers around disease states rather than traditional disciplines. Instead of asking “what can electrical engineers contribute to medicine?,” they’re asking “what would it take to cure allergic asthma?,” and then assembling whoever can answer that question, whether they’re immunologists, computational biologists, materials scientists, AI researchers, or wireless communications engineers.
Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU’s vice president for bioengineering strategy and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering.New York University
The early results suggest they’re onto something. A chemical engineer and an electrical engineer collaborated to build a device that detects airborne threats — including disease pathogens — that’s now a startup. A visually impaired physician teamed with mechanical engineers to create navigation technology for blind subway riders. And Jeffrey Hubbell, the Institute’s leader, is advancing “inverse vaccines” that could reprogram immune systems to treat conditions from celiac disease to allergies — work that requires equal fluency in immunology, molecular engineering, and materials science.
The underlying problem these collaborations address is conceptual as much as organizational. In his field, Hubbell argues that modern medicine has optimized around a single strategy: developing drugs that block specific molecules or suppress targeted immune responses. Antibody technology has been the workhorse of this approach. “It’s really fit for purpose for blocking one thing at a time,” he says. The pharmaceutical industry has become extraordinarily good at creating these inhibitors, each designed to shut down a particular pathway.
But Hubbell asks a different question: Rather than inhibit one bad thing at a time, what if you could promote one good thing and generate a cascade that contravenes several bad pathways simultaneously? In inflammation, could you bias the system toward immunological tolerance instead of blocking inflammatory molecules one by one? In cancer, could you drive pro-inflammatory pathways in the tumor microenvironment that would overcome multiple immune-suppressive features at once?
This shift from inhibition to activation requires a fundamentally different toolkit — and a different kind of researcher. “We’re using biological molecules like proteins, or material-based structures — soluble polymers, supramolecular structures of nanomaterials — to drive these more fundamental features,” Hubbell explains. You can’t develop those approaches if you only understand biology, or only understand materials science, or only understand immunology. You need an understanding and a mastery of all three.
“There will be people doing AI, data science, computational science theory, people doing immunoengineering and other biological engineering, people doing materials science and quantum engineering, all really in close proximity to each other.” —Jeffrey Hubbell, NYU Tandon
Which logically leads to the question: How do you create researchers with that kind of cross-disciplinary depth?
The answer isn’t what you might expect. “There may have been a time when the objective was to have the bioengineer understand the language of biology,” Hubbell says. “But that time is long, long gone. Now the engineer needs to become a biologist, or become an immunologist, or become a neuroscientist.”
Hubbell isn’t talking about engineers learning enough biology to collaborate with biologists. He’s describing something more radical: training people whose disciplinary identity is genuinely ambiguous. “The neuroengineering students — it’s very difficult to know that they’re an engineer or a neuroscientist,” Hubbell says. “That’s the whole idea.”
His own students exemplify this. They publish in immunology journals, present at immunology conferences. “Nobody knows they’re engineers,” he says. But they bring engineering approaches — computational modeling, materials design, systems thinking — to immunological problems in ways that traditional immunologists wouldn’t.
The mechanism for creating these hybrid researchers is what Hubbell calls a “milieu.” “To learn it all on your own is hopeless,” he acknowledges, “but to learn it in a milieu becomes very, very efficient.”
NYU is expanding its facilities to include a science and technology hub designed to force encounters between people across various schools and disciplines who wouldn’t naturally cross paths.Tracey Friedman/NYU
NYU is making that milieu physical. The university has acquired a large building in Manhattan that will serve as its science and technology hub — a deliberate co-location strategy designed to force encounters between people across various schools and disciplines who wouldn’t naturally cross paths.
Juan de Pablo is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and Executive Dean of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering.Steve Myaskovsky, Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau
“There will be people doing AI, data science, computational science theory, people doing immunoengineering and other biological engineering, people doing materials science and quantum engineering, all really in close proximity to each other,” Hubbell explains.
The strategy mirrors what Juan de Pablo, NYU’s Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Executive Vice President for Global Science and Technology and Executive Dean at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, describes as organizing around “grand challenges” rather than traditional disciplines. “What drives the recruitment and the spaces and the people that we’re bringing in are the problems that we’re trying to solve,” he says. “Great minds want to have a legacy, and we are making that possible here.”
But physical proximity alone isn’t enough. The Institute is also cultivating what Hubbell calls an “explicit” rather than “tacit” approach to translation — thinking about clinical and commercial pathways from day one.
“It’s a terrible thing to solve a problem that nobody cares about,” Hubbell tells his students. To avoid that, the Institute runs “translational exercises” — group sessions where researchers map the entire path from discovery to deployment before launching multi-year research programs. Where could this fail? What experiments would prove the idea wrong quickly? If it’s a drug, how long would the clinical trial take? If it’s a computational method, how would you roll it out safely?
The new cross-institutional initiative represents a major investment in science and technology, and includes adding new faculty, state-of-the-art facilities, and innovative programs.NYU Tandon
The approach contrasts sharply with typical academic practice. “Sometimes academics tend to think about something for 20 minutes and launch a 5-year PhD program,” Hubbell says. “That’s probably not a good way to do it.” Instead, the Institute brings together people who have actually developed drugs, built algorithms, or commercialized devices — importing their hard-won experience into the planning phase before a single experiment is run.
The timing may be fortuitous. De Pablo notes that AI is compressing timelines dramatically. “What we thought was going to take 10 years to complete, we might be able to do in 5,” he says.
But he’s quick to note AI’s limitations. While tools like AlphaFold can predict how a single protein folds — a breakthrough of the last five years — biology operates at much larger scales. “What we really need to do now is design not one protein, but collections of them that work together to solve a specific problem,” de Pablo explains.
Hubbell agrees: “Biology is much bigger — many, many, many systems.” The liver and kidney are in different places but interact. The gut and brain are connected neurologically in ways researchers are just beginning to map. “AI is not there yet, but it will be someday. And that’s our job — to develop the data sets, the computational frameworks, the systems frameworks to drive that to the next steps.”
It’s a moment of unusual ambition. “At a time when we’re seeing some research institutions retrench a little bit and limit their ambitions,” de Pablo says, “we’re doing just the opposite. We’re thinking about what are the grand challenges that we want to, and need to, tackle.”
The bet is that the breakthroughs worth making can’t emerge from any single discipline working alone. They require collisions —sometimes planned, sometimes accidental — between people who speak different technical languages and are willing to develop a shared one. NYU is engineering those collisions at scale.
Joby Aviation is kicking off 10 days of electric air taxi demo flights in New York City. Before you try to book one to bypass the city’s awful traffic, Joby’s aircrafts aren’t taking customers yet. Instead, the company is trialing the air taxis in “real flight routes and real environments,” as indicated in its press release.
With the first point-to-point flight of its electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft completed, Joby said that one of its electric air taxis made it from John F. Kennedy International Airport to NYC’s heliports in Lower Manhattan and Midtown in less than 10 minutes. Unlike helicopters, Joby’s CEO, JoeBen Bevirt, said this “quiet, zero operating emissions air taxi service” will better serve New Yorkers. These demo flights are part of Joby’s participation in the eVTOL Integration Pilot Program, the Federal Aviation Administration’s program to fast-track the commercial rollout of air taxis.
Joby said it’s still in the final stages of securing FAA certification, but this latest campaign in NYC should propel its process forward, especially after having completed piloted demos in the San Francisco Bay Area in March. Joby was previously targeting to launch its air taxi service in 2025, but that goal has since been pushed back. The company’s CEO said that Joby is planning to start passenger flights in New York, Texas and Florida as soon as the second half of 2026, according to Bloomberg.
Weekend Open Thread – Corporette.com
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