Ever since I was a child, I’ve despised answering the phone when an unknown number calls. Who could be on the other end? Literally anyone: an acquaintance, a telemarketer, a serial killer who’s menacingly breathing into the mouthpiece.

While Apple’s upcoming Liquid Glass refresh in iOS 26 is likely to be the most immediately noticeable aspect of the software update as it starts rolling out to the public on September 15, I believe a smaller addition in iOS 26 might even have a bigger impact on how iPhone owners use their devices.

The iPhone is finally getting call screening. Hallelujah. At launch, the feature will support calls coming in from nine different languages, including English, Spanish, and Japanese.

Once your iPhone updates to iOS 26, you can opt in and have the software automatically screen calls that come from unknown numbers. In this case, an unknown number is any phone number you haven’t interacted with before.

When your phone automatically picks up the call, a robotic voice asks the caller for their name as well as why they want to get in contact with you. Only after that information is collected, the iPhone will ring and show you these details in a notification bubble so you can decide whether to answer.

I was ecstatic to see this new option as I experimented with a beta version of iOS 26. I’m constantly getting calls from so many unknown numbers that I’ve completely given up answering the phone for anyone not saved in my contacts list.

With the imminent release of iOS 26, I can make informed decisions to ignore or answer these calls. And while most of the calls will still be ignored, I no longer have to wait until the caller starts leaving a voicemail and the live transcription appears on the screen to make a decision.

Call screening will be new for iPhones owners this fall, but users of some Android smartphones, like Google’s Pixel, have had a version of this tool, named Call Screen, available to them for years. Lyubov Farafonova, a product manager at Google, says in a statement emailed to WIRED that millions of Pixel users are using the feature in the US alone. “It is one of our fan favorite features,” she says.

Since its release of call screening in 2018, Google has worked to make the synthetic voice sound more natural for incoming callers. It’s also started showing relevant replies as tappable options while the screening is in progress so users can easily communicate with unknown callers without actually answering the phone. Further leaning into this feature, Google plans to roll out call screening to additional markets this fall.

“Pixel 10 owners in India can start experimenting with the beta version of manual Call Screen. This feature will be initially working in English and Hindi, with more languages and dialects on the way,” Farafonova says. “It will have a functionality to not only transcribe but also translate what the caller says to the Call Screen bot, to make life easier for those who don’t speak the same language as the caller.” Options for call screenings, manual or automatic, are coming soon to Pixel owners in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the UK as well.

In the future, it could become easier to manufacture methanol from biomass decentrally and on site. Researchers at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) are proposing a method with which raw and waste materials from plants can be processed in a self-contained procedure under mild reaction conditions.

This method means that the complex drying and transportation of biomass to large biomass gasification plants becomes superfluous. The results are published in the journal Green Chemistry.

Methanol is a versatile basic chemical and promising energy carrier—for example, as a drop-in fuel that can be used directly in existing vehicles. The methyl alcohol with the chemical formula CH₃OH is currently mainly gained from fossil natural gas, making this process incompatible with long-term climate goals.

“Sustainable methanol from biomass will be able to compensate a proportion of methanol production from fossil fuels in the future. However, the current methods mean that this process is very complex and uses large amounts of energy,” says Dr. Patrick Schühle from the Chair of Chemical Reaction Engineering at FAU.

Research into methanol synthesis from biomass has primarily focused on biomass gasification up to now. During this process, waste material from agriculture or forestry and waste products such as hydrolysates from paper manufacturing is first dried, often ground up and subsequently transported to large gasification plants.

The material is first converted into synthesis gas at temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius and subsequently converted into methanol at pressures of between 50 and 100 bar. Since dry biomass has a lower volumetric energy density, it is often made into pellets before being transported, which means additional costs are involved.

80% carbon efficiency

The new method has a decisive advantage in that it enables wet biomass such as pomace, grass cuttings, wood chips or straw to be processed without prior drying. Since further processing such as shredding and pelleting is not required and hardly any external process heat, smaller plants can also be used.

“This process allows methanol to be produced in a more decentralized manner than was previously possible,” says Schühle. “Investing in this new technology could definitely be worthwhile for large farms or forestry operations or agricultural cooperatives.” The researchers have also been using the expertise of OxFA GmbH, a company based in Scheßlitz near Bamberg and a world leader in producing formic acid from biomass.

Competitive costs

Since the costs for methanol production mainly depend on the availability of green hydrogen, the researchers incorporated an electrolyzer into their design. It produces the oxygen and the hydrogen required for the reaction by splitting water.

Schühle says, “Electrolysis requires large amounts of energy. Ideally, the electricity required comes from renewable sources, such as photovoltaics or a local wind farm.”

Agrivoltaics, which is the use of agricultural land for producing both food and electricity, is increasingly being discussed in this context. With feed-in tariffs continuing to stagnate or even decline, it is becoming more economically attractive to use electricity generated by PV to produce methanol. In addition, it would be possible to produce methanol by storing formic acid temporarily only when electricity prices are particularly favorable.

“We have calculated that green methanol could be produced in the future at a similar cost to methanol produced using natural gas,” explains Schühle. “This means it could make a meaningful contribution to the defossilization of our industrial landscape from an economic point of view.”

From health monitors and smartwatches to foldable phones and portable solar panels, demand for flexible electronics is growing rapidly. But the durability of those devices—their ability to stand up to thousands of folds, flexes and rolls—is a significant concern.

New research by engineers from Brown University has revealed surprising details about how cracks form in multilayer flexible electronic devices. The team shows that small cracks in a device’s fragile electrode layer can drive deeper, more destructive cracks into the tougher polymer substrate layer on which the electrodes sit. The work overturns a long-held assumption that polymer substrates usually resist cracking.

“The substrate in flexible electronic devices is a bit like the foundation in your house,” said Nitin Padture, a professor of engineering at Brown and corresponding author of the study published in npj Flexible Electronics. “If it’s cracked, it compromises the mechanical integrity of the entire device. This is the first clear evidence of cracking in a device substrate caused by a brittle film on top of it.”

The layers used in flexible electronics have specific jobs. The top layer conducts electricity across the surface to keep the device running. That layer is usually made of special ceramic oxide materials because they are transparent and also good conductors, which is essential for things like display screens, sensors and solar cells. But ceramics are brittle and prone to cracking, so the substrate’s job is to add some toughness. Substrates are generally made from polymer materials that are highly flexible and resist cracking.

While using these materials to make flexible solar cells, Anush Ranka, a postdoctoral researcher at Brown who performed the work as a Ph.D. student in materials science, became increasingly curious about the mechanism by which fatigue can degrade performance. He decided to take a closer look at the cracking processes.

For the study, Ranka made small experimental devices using various types of ceramic electrodes and polymer substrates. He then subjected them to bending tests and used a powerful electron microscope to examine the cracks. In places where he found cracks in the ceramic layer, he used a focused ion beam—a kind of nanoscale sandblaster—to etch away the ceramic and reveal the substrate directly beneath a ceramic crack.

The work showed that cracks in the ceramic layer often drive deeper cracks into the substrate. The effect occurred across ceramic and polymer combinations, suggesting this is a common—and surprising—failure mechanism in flexible electronics.

Once cracks form deep in the polymer, the researchers say, they become permanent structural defects. With repeated bending, these cracks widen, misalign or fill with debris, which then prevents the ceramic crack faces from reconnecting. That causes electrical resistance to increase and device performance to degrade.

Working with Haneesh Kesari, a Brown engineering professor who specializes in theoretical and applied mechanics, and solid mechanics Ph.D. student Sayaka Kochiyama, the researchers analyzed this cracking problem. They showed that a mismatch in the elastic properties of the two layers was driving the deep cracking phenomenon in the substrate. Understanding the cracking mechanism led the team toward a potential fix: Adding a third layer of material between the ceramic and the substrate that mitigates the elastic mismatch.

“We created a design map that identified hundreds of polymers that—with the correct thickness—could potentially mitigate this elastic mismatch and prevent cracking in a wide range of electrode-substrate combinations,” said Padture, who leads Brown’s Initiative for Sustainable Energy. “Using this design map, we were able to choose a specific polymer for the third layer and experimentally demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.”

The researchers are hopeful that the design diagram will make for more durable devices. Just as important, however, is the discovery that cracks do indeed affect polymer substrates—a fact that was not apparent before this research.

“We’re essentially solving a problem people didn’t know they had,” Padture said. “We think this could significantly improve the cyclic life of flexible devices.”