Technology

• Chiral semiconductors use a few tricks from Mother Nature
• The same brightness with much less energy usage
• Big implications for future computers as well as displays

A breakthrough new OLED technology could mean smartwatches with longer battery life, more energy-efficient TVs, and even brighter displays all around.

The breakthrough comes from researchers at the University of Cambridge and the Eindhoven University of Technology, and it revolves around what are called chiral semiconductors.

The research shows that these semiconductors can deliver "record-breaking" brightness and efficiency, and that could be a really big deal for any device with a display from the smallest smartwatch to the most massive OLED TV.

Here comes the science bit

One of the biggest energy drains in screens is the use of polarization layers, which in OLED TVs are generally used to reduce ambient light leakage, ensure the precise contrast the tech is known for. But this filtering process absorbs a lot of light – the firm American Polarizers Inc says that any polarizer absorbs more than 50% of the light going through it; that's a lot of wasted energy.

This new technology is different because it does its own polarization.

According to Eindhoven University of Technology, the semiconductor that the researchers have developed emits circularly polarized light that "carries information about the ‘left or right-handedness’ of electrons." Where normal silicon semiconductors are symmetrical, chiral molecules are left- or right-handed and mirror one another. The most famous example of that is in DNA, where they form the double helix we know so well.

Making chiral semiconductors has proven to be very difficult, but the researchers have found a way. Taking their inspiration from nature, the researchers created right- and left-handed spiral columns from stacks of semiconducting molecules. And those columns could transform the best OLED TVs, the best smartwatches, and everything in between.

According to Professor Sir Richard Friend from Cambridge University, who co-led the research, “Unlike rigid inorganic semiconductors, molecular materials offer incredible flexibility – allowing us to design entirely new structures, like chiral LEDs. It’s like working with a Lego set with every kind of shape you can imagine, rather than just rectangular bricks.”

The semiconductor the team has created is based on a material known as triazatruxene, or TAT for short. It self-assembles into a helix and electrons can spiral along it; the university describes it as being like the head of a screw.

Those structures can be incorporated into OLED panels, as co-first author Rituparno Chowdhury, from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, explains. "We’ve essentially reworked the standard recipe for making OLEDs like we have in our smartphones, allowing us to trap a chiral structure within a stable, non-crystallising matrix."

The circularized, polarized LEDs demonstrated "record-breaking efficiency, brightness and polarization, making them the best of their kind," Eindhoven University of Technology says.

We're still years away from seeing this technology in any of the best TVs. But it's a big breakthrough that's relevant not just to TVs and other electronic items. According to Eindhoven University of Technology it also has big implications for quantum computing and what's known as "spintronics": a field of research that uses electrons' spin to store and process information, and that one day may lead to faster, more secure computers.

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• AMD has published official benchmarks for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 APU
• It demonstrates a clear lead over the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V
• The tests were conducted in LM Studio with various LLMs

Official benchmarks have backed up the "Strix Halo" AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395's performance as the "most powerful x86 APU" on the market for AI computing.

The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is a 16-core (32 threads) processor with a 50+ peak AI TOPS XDNA 2 NPU, and Radeon 8060S integrated graphics (40 RDNA 3.5 Compute Units) for some serious processing power for the form factor. It's being primarily marketed by AMD for its handling of AI workloads, such as in applications such as LM Studio.

This is evident in AMD's published benchmarks for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, which are measured in 'tokens per second' and 'time to first token' in LM Studio against its competition. Specifically, we see how the new "Strix Halo" processor inside of the Asus ROG Flow Z13 with 64GB RAM compares to a similar spec Asus Zenbook S14 with 32GB RAM.

The latter machine has half the unified memory and is using the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V APU with its baked-in Arc integrated graphics clocked at 140V, so it's not necessarily a 1:1 comparison. However, AMD has showcased the prowess of its latest chipset in LM Studio 0.3.11 with "various LLMs" with a 16GB model size, demonstrating at least twice the effective tokens per second with DeepSeek R1, Phi 4 Mini Instruct, and Llama 3.2 compared to its rival.

The lead becomes more dramatic when comparing time to first token in text models, with up to 12.2x faster as evidenced by the benchmarks in DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14b, with a similar lead of 11.3x in Phi 4 14b. It's not a consistent lead across all text models, however, as the Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is anywhere from 4x to 9x faster in Llama 3.2 and other DeepSeek R1 distilled models.

AMD's Ryzen AI Max+ 395 is also claimed to be up to seven times faster in SOTA vision models in the time to first token, this can be seen in IBM Granite Vision 3.2 2B while the chip is six times faster in Google Gemma 3 12b; it's roughly halved when comparing against Gema 3 4b, though.

Powerful performance that should not be too shocking

AMD's leading "Strix Point" APU is head and shoulders above the Intel Core Ultra 7 processor in a way that should not be surprising to those interested in AI computing. That's because Team Blue's hardware was made with lower threshold AI computing in mind, and this can be seen in the architectural differences when analyzing the two.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 258V features eight cores and eight threads with a maximum boost clock of up to 4.8 GHz and a maximum TDP of 37W. In contrast, the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 has 16 cores, 32 threads, a boost clock of up to 5.1 GHz, and a default TDP of 55W. However, this TDP is configurable up to 120W, so it's a night and day hardware difference in the chipsets. Of course, AMD's hardware was going to come out on top; it's far more powerful across the board.

Then we have to consider the two tested machines used for the benchmarks, the differences between the Asus ROG Flow Z13 (a leading gaming laptop) and the Asus Zenbook S14 (a midrange ultrabook). We reviewed the latter device late last year giving it a four-star write-up, citing the "solid performance" from the Lunar Lake processor. The chip debuted inside this machine (and similar) back in September 2024, while the AMD Ryzen™ AI Max+ 395 hit the scene this month.

It's not just AI laptops that are using the flagship Ryzen AI chipset for its performance capabilities as a myriad of mini PCs are using them for productivity and even gaming use. It's become a race to launch the most powerful AI mini PCs possible as mid-March to mid-May are targeted from companies, such as GMKTec and Aoostar, which are leading the charge.

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• Garmin smartwatches have been used in a study conducted by Harvard and Oxford
• Early results have indicated a link between happiness, wellbeing, and the data provided by smartwatches
• Key findings suggest that daily physical activity and sleep are "strongly correlated" with increased happiness and reduced stress

A new study from Harvard University and the University of Oxford powered by the best Garmin watches has suggested a direct link between daily activity, sleep, happiness, and stress.

Garmin has revealed the early results from the study, which it says is the first large-scale study of its kind in this field.

The study aims to "identify predictors of happiness and wellbeing" using data from smartwatches and smartphones. While these results need to be corroborated with a larger upcoming global study, early indications appear to reveal "an important relationship between sleep, exercise, and happiness."

We already knew this didn't we?

(Image credit: Future / Matt Evans)

So what exactly do Garmin's early results reveal? Garmin says "Daily physical activity and adequate sleep, both measured by Garmin devices, were strongly correlated with increased happiness and reduced levels of stress."

What's more, emotional stability varies with age, but appears to increase as we get older.

The study also had a high retention rate, which appears to indicate that participants found value in self-monitoring their emotions during the day.

Finally, respondents were found to be happiest "when involved in cultural and social activities, eating, or spending time with friends and family."

Garmin also shared a happiness and physical activity graph constructed from the data, which reveals the link between happiness and burning calories.

The good news? Burning calories increases happiness. The bad news? To increase happiness, you need to burn calories...

(Image credit: Garmin)

The preliminary results hint at what we all probably know at some level about fitness and well-being: getting active and exercising is good for your mood and your overall happiness.

Garmin, Oxford, and Harvard now plan to expand their study to 10,000 participants across the globe. Respondents will be sent a survey three times a day asking them to identify their level of happiness, and the activities they've completed. The data will be cross-referenced with metrics from Garmin devices to build a picture of the link between happiness and variables like sleep and activity.

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• Roku is testing ads that appear on startup
• Users say the sound is on and some can't be skipped
• Roku is keen to add more advertising to its platform

Some Roku owners are promising that "my Roku devices will be in the trash" if it goes ahead with its latest ad-serving idea: showing you an ad before you get to the home screen.

Disgruntled users are turning to online forums to describe what's going on and to express their displeasure. As one poster to r/Roku explained, "I just turned on my Roku and got an unskippable ad for a movie before I got to the regular Roku homescreen." Other Redditors confirmed that they too were getting the ads (via Ars Technica).

The ad that's causing concern was for Moana 2 (which just launched on Disney+) which users say auto-played with sound on when the Roku device was started up.

Roku has confirmed that this is no accident, but it's not necessarily a permanent addition.

Roku users are having a, ahem, moan-a about unwanted ads. (Image credit: Disney ) Attack of the unwanted ads

As Ars Technica reports, Roku has confirmed that the auto-playing adverts are supposed to be there as part of an experiment. Roku "has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products."

According to Roku, sticking an intrusive ad before the home screen is part of "providing a delightful and simple user experience." But from what I've seen online, users are far from delighted: for some this is a step too far on an already ad-heavy platform. And Roku could go further: as we've reported a few times, Roku's vision for the future of television is more sell-o-vision.

Roku isn't alone here, of course. The razor-thin profit margins when selling even the best TVs mean that many manufacturers see advertising and user data as absolutely vital ways of generating money in an increasingly competitive market.

But Roku does appear to be particularly aggressive about advertising, and it's at the stage of upsetting some customers who feel that the platform is degrading a product they've already paid for. As one Roku owner put it in r/Roku: "Why does everything have to start sucking so much?"

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• Security outfit Wallarm spotted a PoC in the wild
• The method abuses a deserialization flaw in Apache Tomcat
• It allows attackers to fully take over vulnerable endpoints

A deserialization vulnerability on Apache Tomcat servers is being abused in the wild to completely take over affected endpoints, security researchers are warning.

Wallarm has revealed it saw a Chinese forum user, alias iSee857, share a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a flaw tracked as CVE-2025-24813, warning threat actors only need one PUT API request to take over the vulnerable server. The request is used to upload a malicious serialized Java session, which then allows the attacker to trigger deserialization by referencing the malicious session ID in a GET request.

“Tomcat, seeing this session ID, retrieves the stored file, deserializes it, and executes the embedded Java code, granting full remote access to the attacker,” Wallarm explained.

Dead simple

The researchers added that the attack is “dead simple” to execute, and requires no authentication. The only requirement is that Tomcat is using file-based session storage which, according to the researchers, is “common in many deployments”. Furthermore, base64 encoding means the attack will bypass most traditional security filters.

Most web application firewalls (WAF) “completely miss” this attack, Wallarm further warned, since the PUT request looks normal, the payload is base64-encoded, the attack is two-step, where the harmful only happens in the second step, and since most WAFs don’t deeply inspect uploaded files.

“This means that by the time an organization detects the breach in its logs, it’s already too late.”

The worst part, Wallarm concluded, is that “this is just the first wave,” as it expects threat actors to start uploading malicious JSP files, modifying configurations, and planting backdoors outside session storage.

It was not yet assigned a severity score, and as per the NVD, it affects Apache Tomcat from 11.0.0-M1 through 11.0.2, from 10.1.0-M1 through 10.1.34, and from 9.0.0.M1 through 9.0.98.

Users are advised to upgrade to version 11.0.3, 10.1.35 or 9.0.98, which fixes the issue.

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• Google Messages could get WhatsApp-style mentions
• An overhauled preferences menu also suggests an app redesign could be in the works
• Neither the new feature or redesign has been officially confirmed

Google Messages could finally be getting a seriously useful feature for group chats, as well as an overhauled design, if newly discovered code makes it to release.

In an APK teardown (which is a look at upcoming and unreleased code in future Android updates) the team at Android Authority uncovered a new mentions feature for Google Messages group chats.

A mentions feature typically allows users to tag others in group chats by placing an @ symbol before their name, similar to social media platforms and other messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram.

Tagging a user then sends them a direct notification, making it much easier to speak directly to an individual or group of people within a wider group chat.

However, as the report notes, the unreleased code doesn’t actually include directions for how Google Messages mentions will actually work, so this is an educated guess based on other implementations on other apps.

Google Messages has steadily been improved over the last few months to add more modern features, such as upgraded media quality, individual read receipts, and unsending messages. As the default messaging app on many of the best Android phones, it’s one of the most commonly used messaging apps worldwide.

But as a separate Android Authority APK teardown notes, we might be getting more than new features in Google Messages’ near future, as further unreleased code hints at an Android 16-inspired redesign.

This second APK teardown enabled the activation of a redesigned Preferences screen, sporting a simplified look that reflects the wider Android 16 UI, which suggests a redesign for the rest of the app is either on the way or being considered.

Of course, Google is under no obligation to actually implement any of this unreleased code, and things may change before release.

Personally, I’m starting to root for Google Messages as a legitimate rival to third-party messaging services like WhatsApp and Apple’s own Messages app. The slew of new features we’ve gotten over the past few years has transformed Google Messages from a backup option to an overall impressive experience.

What do you make of these possible updates? Are you keen to see Google Messages get a redesign? Let us know in the comments.

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• Apple's rumored 18.8-inch foldable might run macOS
• It's also now tipped to launch in 2027
• It could rely on big changes coming in macOS 16

While many of its rivals – Samsung, Google, OnePlus, and more – have started to release foldables, Apple has been noticeably absent. New leaks, however, are teasing it’s not just working on a bendy iPhone but a folding iPad too that is tipped to run macOS.

We reported yesterday (March 17) on the most recent foldable iPhone rumors. It could launch in 2026 but it may be pretty darn pricey, with a starting price of $2,300 (around £1,750 / AU$3,600) – for that kind of money we’re expecting an invisible crease and a self-healing screen.

Today we want to instead focus on Apple’s rumored 18.8-inch foldable which is said to be an iPad-MacBook hybrid. Previously it wasn't expected to launch until 2028, but a new report from Analyst Jeff Pu (via MacRumors) now suggests the foldable will begin production in late 2026 ahead of a 2027 release.

Beyond teasing an earlier release than we expected, Pu adds that the hybrid will lean more towards its MacBook side – saying he believes the foldable will run MacOS instead of iPadOS. This ties into comments made by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman (behind a paywall) that design changes are coming to iOS 19 and macOS 16 to better support foldables and touch-screen computers.

(Image credit: Apple)

For now, however, this report should be taken with a pinch of salt. While Jeff Pu is an analyst with a fairly solid track record, his macOS guess is just that: a guess. He doesn’t cite an insider’s leak and instead references a Wall Street Journal report (paywalled) which describes the foldable as being like a laptop but doesn’t directly confirm it runs on macOS.

That said, it wouldn’t be the first time the large foldable has been associated with macOS.

Back in December last year, we reported on rumors the device would be able to run macOS apps – though then it was said the device would run a souped-up version of iPadOS capable of running both operating systems' apps.

Even if it doesn’t end up running macOS proper, it sounds like Apple is gearing up to launch some kind of touchscreen laptop-like device which certainly has its appeal though some major questions remain like the device’s cost and specs. If the foldable iPhone is $2,300, expect this larger display to be a lot more expensive when it launches.

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