Technology

It has been over a year since the European Accessibility Act (EAA) came into effect, and many organizations are still discovering gaps in the accessibility of their digital services. While websites, mobile apps, e-commerce platforms and digital banking services may meet recognized accessibility requirements, technical conformance alone does not always guarantee an accessible user experience.

People using assistive technologies can still encounter barriers such as confusing workflows, unclear error messages, or content that is difficult to interpret with screen readers.

Accessibility is increasingly viewed as an indicator of digital quality, rather than just a compliance obligation. Yet, making sure that digital experiences work for everyone requires more than good intentions. It depends on assessments, audits and real-world testing to validate accessibility in practice.

This challenge is especially significant for technology companies, where accessibility cannot be addressed by focusing on a single website or application. Instead, it must be managed across portfolios of products, development teams and release cycles.

This requires a continuous approach to accessibility, underpinned by a comprehensive accessibility ecosystem that combines assessments, audits, automated testing and insights from people with disabilities throughout the software development lifecycle.

Accessibility assessments and audits

Improving accessibility begins with understanding where barriers exist and how they affect users. Accessibility assessments provide a high-level view of accessibility risks, helping organizations identify priority issues early and determine where additional investigation is needed.

These assessments can combine automated tools with targeted manual reviews of designs and/or products to offer guidance on where organizations should focus their accessibility efforts for impactful quality improvement.

Accessibility audits take this process a step further. They provide a comprehensive evaluation of digital products against recognized standards such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2) and the EAA, documenting accessibility issues, their severity and recommended remediation steps.

Unlike assessments, audits systematically evaluate entire products or services to validate conformance and propose a clear remediation roadmap. They may also go beyond websites and applications to include customer-facing digital content such as PDFs, presentations and other documents that are subject to accessibility legislation.

Together, assessments and audits establish a foundation for an effective accessibility program. However, simply demonstrating technical compliance does not necessarily guarantee a positive user experience. Individuals using assistive technologies may still encounter barriers that automated checks and standards-based testing cannot detect.

Therefore, audits should form part of a more comprehensive accessibility strategy, complemented by expert evaluation and feedback from people with disabilities.

Why real-world insights matter

Automated accessibility testing tools have become an important part of modern software development. They quickly identify common coding issues, such as missing alternative text, inadequate color contrast and incorrect heading structures, helping teams resolve straightforward problems earlier in development.

These tools also integrate easily into CI/CD pipelines, making them an effective way to catch basic accessibility issues before software is released.

AI is expanding what these tools can do. It can help recognize patterns, group similar issues and recommend possible fixes, thereby reducing repetitive work for development teams. However, AI cannot replace human judgement; machine-generated fixes may be inaccurate, address only superficial issues or create a false sense of accessibility if the underlying user experience has not been properly evaluated.

Indeed, even with these advances, automated testing has its limits. As the W3C notes, “web accessibility evaluation tools cannot determine accessibility, they can only assist in doing so.” They cannot determine whether link text makes sense out of context, whether keyboard focus follows a logical order or how someone using a screen reader experiences a user journey.

While automated tools can highlight symptoms, they lack the human context needed to understand the full impact on usability.

This is why effective accessibility programs combine automated testing with manual expert reviews and testing by people with disabilities who rely on assistive technologies every day. Together, these approaches provide a more complete understanding of how people experience digital products, helping organizations identify accessibility barriers that automated testing alone may miss.

Building an accessibility ecosystem

Organizations should view accessibility as an ongoing capability rather than a one-off project with a fixed endpoint. Instead of depending solely on periodic audits, they need to create an accessibility ecosystem that integrates inclusive practices throughout the development process.

An effective ecosystem brings together developers, designers, accessibility specialists, automated testing tools and people with disabilities in a continuous feedback loop. By including accessibility considerations in planning, design, development, testing and release, organizations can identify and address barriers throughout the development process.

This reduces the effort required to resolve accessibility issues and helps avoid delays that can happen when problems emerge during final compliance checks.

How Microsoft moved beyond compliance

Several technology companies have already built accessibility ecosystems based on these principles. Microsoft, for example, has applied these principles at scale across its Cloud & AI portfolio, which includes more than 1,000 products.

Rather than treating accessibility as a compliance exercise, the company adopted inclusive design research by involving people with disabilities throughout the product lifecycle. As of 2024, this initiative has helped more than 50 product teams improve the inclusivity of products such as Azure and Power Apps, while changing the focus from simply meeting accessibility requirements to creating digital experiences that work well for everyone.

Cisco shifted accessibility left

Since 2022, Cisco has adopted a similar approach with Webex by embedding accessibility and inclusive design throughout the software development lifecycle. By involving individuals with disabilities earlier in the design and testing process and creating continuous feedback loops across development teams, Webex was able to resolve accessibility challenges sooner.

This approach also built greater empathy, collaboration and organizational understanding around inclusive product development.

Progress Software reduced accessibility issues by 60%

Progress Software has been following a comprehensive accessibility program for its client collaboration platform ShareFile since 2023. By combining expert accessibility reviews, testing by people with disabilities and AI-assisted code evaluation, the company reduced accessibility issues by more than 60 per cent year over year.

This investment in accessibility also strengthened customer retention and helped secure new business, reflecting the growing importance of accessibility in software procurement decisions.

Accessibility as a measure of software quality

The EAA has intensified the focus on digital accessibility, but its influence extends beyond just compliance, encouraging organizations to make accessibility an integral part of software development.

Assessments highlight accessibility risks, audits validate compliance with recognized standards, and real-world testing reveals how individuals using assistive technologies experience digital products in practice. Collectively, these activities provide organizations with the evidence and insights required to improve accessibility throughout the development process.

For organizations creating complex digital products, accessibility has become an important indicator of software quality. By embedding accessibility into everyday development practices, organizations can deliver digital experiences that are more inclusive and usable for everyone, while also reducing the cost and complexity of addressing accessibility barriers later in the development process.

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• VodafoneThree says it takes up to 3.5 more years to relocate a mast after the warning period
• So-called 'functional not-spots' affect one in five London high streets, costing billions
• The solution involves earlier planning involvement and slicker processes

VodafoneThree just accused London's network infrastructure planning rules of costing around £7.4 million in economic output every single day, the equivalent of £2.7 billion annually, because of Notices to Quit (NTQs).

These legal notices from landowners demand that mobile operators remove equipment from properties, and are typically issued during construction, renovation or demolition, giving operators just 18 months to take action.

However the company argues that replacing a lost mobile site takes on average five years from start to finish, thus NTQs create a 3.5-year shortfall.

VodafoneThree wants more flexibility around Notices to Quit

However, the company insists that external pressures are behind the current five-year timescale for new connections to go live. Instead, VodafoneThree says that "outdated planning processes and the complexity of securing a new site and relevant permissions" are to blame.

The network operator goes on to describe affected areas as 'functional not-spots' – rather than total black-out not-spots in rural areas, it says even London can be affected by areas of week, suboptimal connectivity even though they're technically covered by a signal. According to the report, one in five London high streets have a functional not-spot.

"When that infrastructure is removed before replacements are in place, local communities can face years of reduced connectivity which ultimately costs London billions in economic output," Chief Networks Officer Andrea Dona summarized.

And with redevelopment happening at such a rapid pace nowadays, it warns that up to 60 National Rail, Underground or Overground stations could be affected by an NTQ at any given time.

Looking ahead, VodafoneThree wants developers and planners to involve mobile operators at the earliest stages possible so that they can get the ball rolling on securing future locations sooner.

"We welcome the growing recognition of NTQs as an issue and support efforts to ensure connectivity is considered from the earliest stages of the planning process," Dona concluded.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Images 2.5 last week, bringing all sorts of impressive upgrades to the way it generates images. The company says the latest model will bring us “sharper details, faster generation, more precise editing, and better tools for creating and sharing.”

We’ve already identified the new features of ChatGPT Images 2.5 you’ll actually use, like Sketch for turning quick drawings into polished images, templates for things like posters and better editing tools.

But it’s not all good news. We’re still a little disappointed by the presence of telltale noise patterns in some of its creations. TechRadar writer Eric Hal Schwartz described the problem well: “Everything gets a gritty, sandy look, and nothing looks clean for some reason.”

What I’m most interested in isn’t necessarily how good ChatGPT’s new image capabilities are, but whether they can realistically pass as genuine photos.

Is this real or AI?

I’ve written before about how I love to comb through the r/isthisAI subreddit, where people post suspicious images and ask everyone else to help them work out whether they’re real.

It’s fascinating but also concerning when you see the number of scams, fake viral posts and completely fabricated people that are now floating around online.

So yes, ChatGPT Images has improved. But has it reached the point where AI images are becoming genuinely different to distinguish from real ones?

The jury’s still out. I think we’ll need a bit of time to experiment ourselves and for r/isthisAI to fill up with new images.

But in the meantime, I’ve been interested in the way Redditors have responded to the new image capabilities. Especially one thread about asking ChatGPT to make the most realistic human image possible.

The Redditor who started the thread shared the resulting image of a young woman. And, at least at first glance, there’s very little about her that screams AI to me.

Can you actually tell which photos are AI now?

I decided to experiment with ChatGPT Images myself, especially with prompts like the Reddit thread in which I tried to get the chatbot to make the most realistic-looking images.

To make the comparison feel as fair as possible, I went through photos from my own travels this summer and picked some I was happy to share. I then asked ChatGPT to create extremely realistic images with similar subjects, settings and compositions.

For some, that meant asking for a realistic photograph of a blonde woman. For others, I recreated the kinds of ordinary travel photos sitting in my camera roll, which was meals in restaurants, boats in harbors and scenes from walks.

Importantly, I wasn’t trying to make spectacular AI art, I really wanted the opposite. Images that were boringly believable.

Take the quiz below to see if you can guess which are the real photos of my travels this summer and which are ChatGPT-generated.

Is that gritty, sandy look still enough to give the AI ones away? Can you focus less on the faces and spot strange details in the backgrounds? Or have we reached the point where your first instinct simply isn’t reliable anymore?

Take the quiz and tell me how you get on in the comments below.

These new pods churn out frothy milk for coffee-house style drinks with the push of a push.

Here are the answers for today’s NYT Mini Crossword puzzle for Sept. 17, 2026.

• Report finds 57% of UK organizations opted to extend legacy system use rather than replace the tech
• This is despite almost half of UK businesses are scaling AI
• Meanwhile, over three quarters of UK businesses have gone over budget on modernization, with over two thirds have paused or abandoned the process

Does technological progress necessarily mean replacing old gear? New research from Ensono claims businesses are keeping hold of legacy tech, with older systems extended and upgraded to support modern applications.

This is happening while businesses scale their AI use, focusing budgets on affordable upgrades for existing PCs, laptops, and servers on one hand, and embracing AI on the other. It’s a balancing act, one that is being managed by around 52% of businesses – 57% in the UK, and 48% in the US.

However, the driving factor for this reliance on older tech may not be smart budgeting and foresight. Across the US and UK, 61% of businesses have been forced to pause, scale back, delay, or even completely abandon IT modernization in the past two years.

IT modernization?

Ensono’s second annual State of IT Modernization Report seems to point to a change in how IT modernization is achieved: rather than replacing old tech, businesses are upgrading. The takeaway is that IT budgets are dictating a focus on AI spending, so where possible PCs, laptops, and some lower-end servers are increasingly being upgraded with faster, higher capacity storage and RAM.

Other key statistics in the report include the news that 71% of IT modernization projects have exceeded budgets, with workflow challenges (33%) and limitations with existing infrastructure (28%) among the roadblocks to an ROI on AI spending.

Underpinning all of this is the growth in decision makers declaring that AI is accelerating modernization, up from 39% last year to 54%.

Rediscovering legacy systems

Budget demands seem to be driving the reliance on older tech within organizations striving to keep up with AI modernization.

“AI is expanding the possibilities for modernization, enterprises are discovering that legacy systems, like the mainframe, are intensely powerful, reliable and efficient sources of computing that can now be augmented and made more agile thanks to AI," noted Brian Klingbeil, Chief Strategy Officer at Ensono.

This means that IT leaders are being forced to decide what needs to be preserved, and where to use AI investment wisely.

“These systems contain decades of data and business logic that drive many businesses,” says Klingbeil. “The advantage will go to organizations that understand their environments well enough to distinguish what should be replaced vs. what should be augmented, and embrace new modernization methods that simply were not available even 18 months ago."

• Salesforce UK&I CEO pushes her skilling "mission" across the country
• Salesforce doubles down on UK&I recruitment and upskilling goals
• Jobs could be repatriated back to the UK from abroad

Salesforce’s UK&I CEO has doubled down on her company’s commitment to investing in skills training and upskilling of young people.

With the UK recently seeing a change in Prime Minister, Zahra Bahroloumi was asked in a media roundtable attended by TechRadar Pro what her outlook for the future looked like.

“Irrespective of government, we are committed to, and very active to the skilling of people,” Bahroloumi said, “we're not stopping, we remain true to our mission, and we remain active and true to our customers, irrespective of government”.

Closing the AI literacy gap

Bahrololoumi has long been a key voice in promoting skills training in the UK, using her company’s influence and scale across the country to push a number of key initiatives.

In June 2026, she outlined the Salesforce’s “incredibly bold” vision for the UK, which includes $6 billion investment committed to the country through 2030, and its role in backing the UK government’s aim to train 10 million UK workers by 2030.

Alongside Bahrololoumi, Paul O’Sullivan, SVP Solution Engineering and Salesforce UKI CTO also looked to outline how Salesforce’s future Trailblazer program is “closing the AI literacy gap”.

O’Sullivan noted how Salesforce is going through “a surge of hiring”, including doubling the size of its forward-deployed engineer team in the UK.

“We are not just looking to attract the best possible talent to come and join Salesforce, we’re also heavily investing in our apprenticeship scheme, doubling down on our graduate opportunities, and aiming to double the size of the team in the next six months,” he noted.

“This is our opportunity to reinvest in the next generation.”

Looking forward, Bahrololoumi was keen to promote the role of the UK in the AI-enabled and augmented future, noting that while the country was, “an empowered market”, there was still potential for more growth.

“We need more talent,” she added, “I feel so confident, and we’ve got the evidence and the proof points that this technology and our platform can work and automate jobs, and augment jobs, and expand human capacity in an organisation effectively.

“But I would like to see more jobs being repatriated from offshore and low-cost locations and jobs being created back in the UK - so I would like to see a stronger drive around automation and repatriation.”

Bahrololoumi gave the example of when there 300 jobs in a low-cost location, outside of the UK - “why can I not create a hundred jobs in the UK and still do 300 plus worth of capacity?”

“That’s something we’re really focused on, because we’ve got the capability to do that now… but I think we've got the opportunity now to create jobs in the UK,” she concluded, “we're on a mission.”

It’s been just over two years since Dyson introduced its second pair of headphones, the OnTrac, to the world. While they were a significant improvement — both in terms of sound and general design — over the Zone, I ultimately found in my Dyson OnTrac review that they still couldn’t quite challenge the class leaders — namely Sony and Bose.

A strong factor in that realisation was their exorbitant AU$799 price tag. Not only was that too much for the Dyson headphones (regardless of brand name), it also allowed other manufacturers to charge AU$700 or more for their premium cans — here’s looking at you, Sony, Bose and Sennheiser.

Now, two years later, the Dyson OnTrac has plummeted to a much more acceptable AU$299 during Dyson’s Spring Sale event. At this price, I think they’re worth a look. The noise cancellation is very good, and a 55-hour battery life gives them greater stamina than the closest competitors. I also can’t really fault the ability to customise them, since it’s a feature that’s still pretty unique. That being said, they’re incredibly heavy, so I found I could only wear them for short stints.

At this price, the Dyson OnTrac becomes a lot easier to recommend, although I’d still tread with caution. Their looks may make them stand out from the crowd, but where audio quality is concerned, they can be beaten. Although I don’t see them getting any cheaper, even during Black Friday 2026 sales in Australia later this year.View Deal

• Check out the latest Dyson AU discount codes for more chances to save.

However, for your AU$300, or thereabouts, you’re not short of great alternatives. So, if you’ve got a burning desire to invest in a new set of mid-priced headphones, take a look at my top recommendations below.

Do note that Amazon recently announced dates for its Prime Big Deal Days sales event. If experience is anything to go by, there’s a good chance my three recommended pairs of headphones below could receive bigger discounts when Prime Big Deal Days kicks off, but they’re worth every cent even right now.

For just under AU$200 (for the white model), the Nothing Headphone (a) are a terrific buy. A vast improvement over the Headphone (1), this newer set delivers a detailed, expansive soundstage coupled with good noise cancellation. Plus, their 135-hour battery life eclipses the OnTrac by some margin. View Deal

QuietComfort SC: was $499.95 now $349.99
Nearly as good as the premium QuietComfort Ultra, the SC misses out on the Immersive Audio mode — though they do come with a soft case. They have dropped to well below AU$300 before, which could happen during the next Prime Day sales event. View Deal

If your budget can stretch, the Sony WH-1000XM5 will reward you with superior sound quality, incredible comfort and excellent ANC. They’re comfortable to wear for long periods and benefit from a smartphone app that opens up a huge world of customisation.View Deal

Spoilers for Neagley ahead.

It likely won't take you long to reach the ending of Neagley on Prime Video — all eight episodes have been released on the streamer — and when you do, it's nothing short of dramatic.

In a nutshell, the Reacher spinoff is following two story strands simultaneously: the death of a young man that's linked to the Echo Canyon Farm cult, and the reasoning behind why Neagley (Maria Sten) has a lifelong fear of being touched and touching others.

We learn that the cult has a secret facility that is being used to test an illegal drug, called Tranqlara, on human subjects, which is all being funded by a Swedish billionaire known as Rawlings. Neagley and her team try to simultaneously avenge her friend's death in episode 1 and save the innocent followers from the effects of Tranqlara, though they're not overly successful.

What it does lead to, however, is the group blowing up the Echo Canyon Farm facility after the death of leader Lawrence (Damon Herriman), walking in the other direction as if they're in the iconic Reservoir Dogs scene.

It's my favorite moment in the entire series (it looks and feels so effortlessly cool), but according to Sten, none of it was filmed in the way that I thought it would be.

'It wasn't as impressive as what you see'

"I thought it was cool, but I could spoil things and say that there was no such explosion behind us as we walk away," Sten tells me. "There was actually a wind turbine. But we played the music that was going to be played and definitely got in the vibe.

Greyston Holt, who plays detective newcomer Hudson Riley, adds, "We knew what it would be. But in the moment, it certainly didn't look as impressive as what you see on screen."

For the first time in what feels like forever, I've been fooled by CGI. If you were to ask me whether the season finale explosion scene was real or digitally generated, I'd have firmly been in the former camp.

However, that doesn't mean everything we see in Neagley was CGI generated. "In the first episode there's a big truck that blows up, and that was a practical explosion. It's a matter of whether we can blow up the set of not," Sten laughs. "It's not always possible, but we always vouch for it."

If Neagley season 2 does get confirmed (come on, Amazon), I'm hoping for even bigger and better actions sequences. Sure, discovering more about Neagley's backstory has been incredibly satisfying, but clearly, nothing truly beats blowing stuff up.

• The Nyrius Phoenix Home is a new wireless HDMI adapter with 500ft line-of-sight range, 75ft through walls or floors
• Delivers 4K resolution with Dolby Atmos, DTS and 7.1-channel surround support
• Launches for $199.99 for the basic transmitter and receiver

The Nyrius Phoenix Home is a true 4K wireless streamer that takes an HDMI source such as your games console, Apple TV 4K or Blu-ray player (or any combination through an AV receiver) and sends it to your TV, projector or desktop monitor.

It's designed to be simple, so there's one HDMI input on the transmitter and one HDMI output on the receiver — and it promises a 500-foot range in plain air, or 75 feet through walls and floors.

This means it could be used as part of a home theater setup, beaming video from your source to your projector or TV across the room without cables, or it could be used as an alternative to running and HDMI cable through your walls so you can send video to other parts of the house.

This isn't the first such streamer by any means, but it's very aggressively priced for a 4K wireless HDMI adapter and delivers an impressive specification for its relatively low price.

(Image credit: Nyrius)Nyrius Phoenix Home: key features and specifications

With the Phoenix Home's 500-foot line-of-sight range, I'm thinking it could be good for movies or sporting events with friends outdoors with a projector or outdoor TV.

Transmitting up to 75 feet through walls and floors means you can use it to stream from a computer in one room to a TV in another, provided the computer has an HDMI output or an HDMI adapter: the Phoenix Home only supports HDMI input.

The Phoenix Home also features USB-C that you can use to remotely control a computer by connecting it to the transmitter and using a keyboard and mouse with the receiver. There's also an IR extender for remote controllers.

The Phoenix Home transmits up to 4K resolution at up to 60fps, and it supports DTS, Dolby Atmos and 7.1-channel surround.

I think there are multiple applications for this kind of device at home as well as in business or educational spaces: it's a good solution for renters who can't start drilling cable runs everywhere, and for rooms that weren't made with AV systems in mind.

A few TV companies have been thinking about rooms where you want to mount the TV above the fireplace or another feature and have your AV receiver, consoles or other home theater gear somewhere else. If you saw Samsung's Wireless One Connect Box or LG's Zero Connect and wished you too could have a wire-free TV, you don't need to splash your cash on one of this year's best TVs to cut the cables: this will provide a similar option for $199.

Our one worry would be what the latency is like for gaming, which we'd have to test to be sure about. But if you're looking to cut the cables for making it easy to move movies around the home, this looks like a very affordable and effective way to do it, and is available now.

Thinking of buying a new TV?

Try our TV size and model finder! You tell it how far you sit from your TV, we'll tell you what size to buy based on viewing angle advice from image quality experts, and we'll recommend our three top TVs at that size for different prices.

Google is expanding its tools so you can invoke a variety of AI agents in your smart home.

Here are hints and the answers for today’s NYT Connections puzzle for Sept. 17, 2026.

Here are hints and the answers for today’s Wordle puzzle for Sept. 17, 2026.

• The US Treasury's FinCEN arm asks financial institutions to file scam center suspicious activity reports under a new keyword
• FinCEN says that it flagged financial moves across 33,904 different filings, but actual losses might differ significantly, as the approach is prone to double-counting transactions
• Only 1,300 institutions filed reports, with 10,082 (29.7%) of them centering around exploitation of the elderly by scammers

The US Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has issuespublished an alert and a companion data analysis telling banks, credit unions, digital asset exchanges, and securities firms that it needs sharper reporting on the overseas scam centers that it says target Americans at an industrial scale.

FinCEN puts total damages, per its reporting mechanism, at roughly $12.7 billion linked to suspected digital asset investment scams between September 2023 and the end of 2025.

The number comes from adding up the dollar values of 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act filings that referenced the keyword from its 2023 "pig butchering" alert, which may be overstated, as it includes both attempted and successful transactions as well as both inbound and outbound reports, often of the same transactions, causing significant overlap.

FinCEN's new requirement is a keyword

While the $12.7 billion is a measure of what institutions have flagged and is prone to double-counting and errors, victim losses, a significant chunk of which go unreported, may be considerably higher.

This has prompted Gene Lange, who effectively works as the Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, to call these scams "one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today."

It has also prompted a new suspicious activity report keyword: "FIN-2026-SCAMCENTERS," which institutions are expected to use to indicate that a scam center is potentially involved.

FinCEN also wants chat logs, scammer phone numbers, social media handles, wallet addresses, transaction hashes, and the URLs victims were told to deposit into, filed in the structured cyber indicator fields rather than left out.

Institutions to volunteer more information to stop scams

The move is part of its push to have institutions volunteer more information under the US Patriot Act, as it aims to confront what is a growing intelligence problem: scammers tend to route victims through several institutions in sequence; most filers see only one slice of a scam's lifecycle and often have difficulty tracing it all the way.

For example, a crypto exchange might see a customer buying USDT and sending it off-platform, a bank might see a wire to that exchange, and a brokerage might see a retirement account liquidated. None of them would have the bigger picture of what essentially happened or what triggered the transaction.

Combined, with properly linked information, it makes it much easier to identify a potential scam; separately, these incidents can inflate the number of reports, which often aren't linked, and investigations can lack insight into the origin or final destination of the funds.

FinCEN's Rapid Response Program has interdicted $1.8 billion and recovered just over $1 billion for 5,790 US victims since 2015, which, against the flagged totals, is a very limited recovery at best compared with the actual funds at stake. This highlights a larger fundamental problem: institutions mostly detect these schemes after the money is gone, and reporting them correctly and thoroughly may yield limited dividends at best against an industry that has morphed, relatively unchecked, into a multi-billion-dollar juggernaut.

Here are hints and the answers for today’s NYT Strands puzzle for Sept. 17, 2026.

• Scientists have developed solar panels that can work up to 10 meters underwater
• The panels can capture up to 324 mWh of energy at that depth
• Each device is expected to last up to five and a half years at a time

A lot of devices are deployed underwater for research and exploration purposes, but powering them all can prove to be difficult, especially if they’re under the waves for a considerable period of time. A new scientific paper, however, has shown that solar panels can be successfully used at depths of up to 10 meters, potentially presenting a new way to keep underwater tech powered up and ready for action.

The paper was published in the Joule periodical and accompanied by a press release explaining its advances. The research was conducted by a team of scientists from Yunnan University in China, who said that a series of solar cells placed 32 feet (10 meters) below the water’s surface in the South China Sea were able to collect enough energy to power up a set of lithium-ion batteries in two hours.

The cells were made from lead halide perovskite with a polymer called polyhexamethylene guanidine hydrochloride added into the mix. This additive helped to enhance the effectiveness of the panels.

According to Wen-Hua Zhang of Yunnan University, “Very few studies have been reported on underwater solar cells, and all of them are focused on very shallow water depths of only two meters or less, a scenario far from catering for requirements of practical application.”

A photo of the prototype solar cells being tested in the South China Sea. (Image credit: Joule)

“This work presents the first functional validation of submerged solar cells practically operating at a water depth of up to about 10 meters, greatly broadening their application scope,” Zhang added. The researchers stated that each cell could be deployed for around five and a half years at a time.

The panels captured 1,416 milliwatt-hours (mWh) of electricity at a depth of two meters. This decreased to 752 mWh at six meters and 324 mWh at ten meters. During separate lab testing, the solar panels had a power conversion efficiency of just under 35%.

Paving the way

Solar panels could one day be used to power ‘self-sustained marine energy systems and autonomous underwater devices,’ researchers believe. (Image credit: datacenterdynamics)

The idea behind this research is that underwater solar panels could be used to power devices such as sensors, cameras, communications systems, and more.

Many of these objects are stationary for much of the time, so nearby solar cells could help keep them topped up and working without necessarily requiring extensive human intervention.

One question that remains unanswered is how exactly solar panels like this would interact with their environment. For example, it’s likely that they would accumulate biomatter that could hinder their operation, potentially requiring regular cleaning in order to remain fully functional. After all, the sunlight that will power these cells could also promote the growth of plants and animals — a process known as biofouling.

Still, the research seems to have potential. As the authors noted, “This work paves the way for the practical deployment of perovskite photovoltaics in underwater environments, offering a promising route toward self-sustained marine energy systems and autonomous underwater devices.”

It’s been 66 million years and science is still learning more about the most famous dinosaur.

A business tool, or a theme park for my face? Right now I’m leaning toward the latter.

Cricket joins the club of mobile providers bundling home internet with mobile phone service.

• A pseudonymous GitHub account has published what it calls a reconstruction of Stuxnet malware that purportedly took out a fifth of Iran's centrifuges before being discovered
• The original source has never surfaced, and the 'Stuxnet' moniker that the account uses comes from Symantec's coining of the name weeks after it was discovered
• The code remains unverified and untested, with some users indicating that it is likely an AI-generated replication of the original binaries' behavior, which has been widely documented

A GitHub account has published what it describes as a faithful reconstruction of Stuxnet, the worm that sabotaged Iranian uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

It also became the first piece of software widely accepted as having caused physical destruction in the real world, highlighting how malicious software can often do much more harm to people and hardware than just stealing or manipulating data.

The repository surfaced via a Show HN submission, which mainstream media outlets then picked up, highlighting the as-yet-unknown researcher's reverse-engineered code.

Not the first or last Stuxnet repository

The original Stuxnet source, written by whoever built it, has never been leaked and did not leak last week. The repository's README explicitly states that it is a reconstruction assembled from decompiled binaries, and those binaries have been in public circulation since Belarusian firm VirusBlokAda pulled samples from an Iranian customer's machines in June 2010.

Everything that followed, including Symantec's W32.Stuxnet Dossier and Ralph Langner's To Kill a Centrifuge, was built on those samples and how they reacted in test environments.

This is also not the first time readable C-language code aiming to replicate Stuxnet has been published online. Malware researcher Amr Thabet published a decompilation of the MRxNet rootkit carrying a 2010 to 2011 copyright notice. Christian Roggia followed with a dropper decompilation called open-myrtus, copyrighted 2012 to 2014, which has since been forked into a long chain of repositories.

The irony is that if such code were a faithful replication of the infamous malware, it would not have mentioned "Stuxnet" in multiple places, including registry keys. This is because the moniker is not one the developers likely used, but one Symantec switched to from its original 'W32.Temphid' identifier.

The thread where it was first brought to attention by a user called Sadpainy also has mixed views from developers, many of whom have branded it 'AI slop' or a 'fake' that relies on a mixture of already existing repositories, even as the about page on its GitHub repo states that it was reproduced by the researcher for educational purposes and is designed to only work on Windows XP and Windows 7.

For those looking to test it, a virtual machine might be their best bet, especially given Stuxnet's ability to physically damage hardware, but it is also a stark reminder of what a rogue AI agent could do if left unchecked without specific instructions or safeguards.