Science

Something over a kilowatt of sunlight goes in the top of the machine. About 195 billionths of a watt does the work. Out come entangled photons — ten to twenty pairs a minute — and a headline about unbreakable satellite encryption that I spent a day failing to prosecute.

Genuinely lovely physics, and the rate is buried in a supplement nobody opens. Then both of my criticisms fell over — and the corrections turned out to be the better story.

A chip made a rainbow, and the rainbow became ten clean millimetre waves at once. Nobody sent a single bit over them. And the thing 6G actually wants millimetre waves for is not speed — it's watching the room.

Ten millimetre-wave tones from one microcomb is lovely physics, honestly reported and mildly oversold downstream. The real story is what 6G plans to do with millimetre waves — and what Germany's data protection authorities said about it in June.

A steel that grows a second suit of armour out of manganese — the one element every textbook says wrecks corrosion resistance. It's real, it's peer-reviewed, and it's been announced as breaking news five times since 2023. The "40x cheaper" everyone quotes was never about hydrogen.