An international team of researchers has, for the first time, comprehensively assessed the state of the art of commercial UVC LEDs and summarized the findings in an open-access review. These compact, efficient, and mercury-free UV light sources are considered a key technology for future disinfection and sterilization systems. The study is published in the Journal of Physics: Photonics.

The paper provides an overview of the performance and particular characteristics of the technology, offering solid data to help to open up both existing and new UVC applications with LEDs.

Ultraviolet (UV) light can inactivate pathogens on surfaces, in the air, and in water. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) operating in the UVC spectral range at wavelengths below 280 nanometers are gaining importance thanks to rapid advances in efficiency and lifetime.

In contrast to conventional UV lamps, they are extremely compact, dimmable, capable of fast switching, and, most importantly, free of mercury. Researchers from the Ferdinand-Braun-Institut (FBH) in Berlin, together with four other institutions, investigated UVC LEDs from 14 manufacturers over a period of two years, covering devices with wavelengths between 260 and 280 nanometers.

The review provides, for the first time, a comprehensive overview of current performance and reliability, thereby bridging the gap between manufacturer’s and user’s perspective.

“Our data support both manufacturers and end-users in making well-informed decisions for the development and deployment of UVC LED systems,” explains Dr. Jan Ruschel, one of the lead authors and a researcher at FBH.

Applications from water purification to air cleaning

UVC LEDs open up a wide range of everyday applications: from environmentally friendly drinking water treatment and air purification in schools and hospitals to the disinfection of refrigerators, dishwashers, touchscreens, and production facilities in the food industry.

In regions without stable power supply, their compact design and low energy requirements enable mobile, solar-powered solutions. Unlike the low-pressure UV lamps that are still commonly used today, UVC LEDs do not contain toxic mercury, show relatively low sensitivity of emission properties to temperature changes, and often have longer lifetimes already.

A guide for manufacturers and users

The paper surveys key parameters of UVC LEDs available on the market that are critical for developing disinfection systems. Both lifetime and efficiency vary significantly—depending on operating conditions, design, and manufacturer. The researchers address thermal, optical, and electrical effects, and how these can be influenced through material selection and operating parameters.

Among other factors, the package type plays an important role. A particular focus is placed on lifetime studies in the form of long-term stress tests under various conditions. Users who want to integrate UVC LEDs into their systems can use this information to derive how cooling, power control, optics, and LED monitoring should be designed.

“With this, we have successfully closed the gap between laboratory research and practical application,” emphasizes Ruschel. “As an application-oriented research institute, it is of special importance to us that innovations truly find their way into real-world use.”

Millions of words spoken in the U.K.’s highest court risk being misunderstood, misquoted or simply missed because transcribing them accurately is too difficult and too expensive, according to a new study from the University of Surrey.

In a new article published in Applied Sciences, the researchers detail how they built an artificial intelligence system that can automatically transcribe U.K. Supreme Court hearings and link them directly to the written judgments—helping lawyers, academics and the public navigate justice like never before.

Every year, more than 449,000 cases move through U.K. tribunals, yet recordings of court hearings remain hard to use. Traditional transcription is slow, costly and prone to errors. Off-the-shelf speech recognition tools struggle with courtroom language, mishearing “my lady” (pronounced “mee-lady” by barristers when addressing a female judge) as “melody” or legal terms like “inherent vice” as “in your advice.”

To tackle this, researchers developed a custom speech recognition system trained on 139 hours of Supreme Court hearings and legal documents. By fine-tuning the model with specialist vocabulary and court etiquette, the system reduced transcription errors by up to 9% compared with leading commercial tools. It also proved more reliable at capturing crucial entities such as provisions, case names and judicial titles.

Professor Constantin Orăsan, co-author of the study and Professor of Language and Translation Technologies at the University of Surrey, said, “Our courts deal with some of the most important questions in society. Yet the way we record and access those hearings is stuck in the past.

“By tailoring AI to the unique language of British courtrooms, we’ve built a tool that makes justice more transparent and accessible—whether you’re a barrister preparing an appeal or a member of the public trying to understand why a judgment was reached.”

The second part of the project used AI to semantically match paragraphs of judgments with the precise timestamp in the video where the argument was made. A prototype interface now lets users scroll through a judgment, click on a paragraph and instantly watch the relevant exchange from the hearing. Tests showed the system correctly linked text and video with an F1 score of 0.85.

An F1 score is a way of measuring how well a system balances two things:

• Precision—of all the results it gave, how many were actually correct.
• Recall—of all the correct results that existed, how many it managed to find.

It punishes a system that is very good at one but bad at the other. It ranges from 0 to 1:

• 1.0 means perfect precision and recall (the system found everything and made no mistakes).
• 0 means total failure.

Evaluation with real users showed that their productivity is dramatically increased when using the UI. Without AI assistance, a legal expert needed 15 hours to identify 10 links, whereas with AI support they were able to validate 220 links in just three hours.

The tool is already attracting interest from legal bodies, including the U.K. Supreme Court and the National Archives. By reducing hours of manual searching into seconds, it promises to help lawyers prepare cases, speed up legal training and allow the public to see how decisions are formed.

Jones, who has blonde highlights and well-defined cheekbones, says she has worked with a host of start-ups and CEOs of small companies to help improve teamwork and boost productivity. Some people, like her, are using knowledge of human design within their own families to help foster more harmonious relations. “My daughters both have entirely different designs than mine, my husband does too,” she says, explaining that she is a projector, like many other coaches like Day. “It’s been so useful to be like, ‘I’m not expecting either my daughters to be anything like me’.”

Human design was born in 1987 when Canadian former advertising executive Robert Krakower, a rumored ketamine enthusiast who had been living like a hippie and residing in a dilapidated casita in Ibiza, claimed to have had an intense transcendental encounter with “the voice” over the course of eight days. As origin myths go, his makes Moses at the burning bush sound almost low-key.

Krakower, a bearded Mufti headdress-wearer who worked part-time at a local school, was walking with his dog when it picked up a scent and approached an abandoned house, noticing a light beneath the door. He shouted at the door and demanded to know, “Who’s there?,” he recalled once in a lecture in Germany. Once inside, the heavy smoker said he heard a voice he imagined to come from “a cigar-smoking 155-year-old woman.”

Then Krakower claimed he started gushing with sweat from head to toe. He went back to his nearby home and said “the voice” instructed him to place his Bible, Bhagavad Gita and Stanford biology textbook together, along with a chessboard and a copper coil. He was told to burn a combination of herbs from the shelves and said a series of cosmic revelations ensued, spanning the Big Bang, the nature of being, the “crystals of consciousness,” and “rave cosmology,” a far out prophecy he went on to make, predicting alien influence in a prophesied influx of disabled and mute children born in or after 2027.

All of this information would help Krakower—who soon renamed himself Ra Uru Hu, a play on his name Robert, a word from “the voice”, and the moment when he demanded to know who was behind the door—forge the pseudoscientific human design system and the bodygraphs which help uniquely define each person according to a series of numbers in his 1992 guide, The Black Book. “Madness is an interesting thing,” said Krakower, who was a “splenic manifestor” and died in 2011 of a heart attack at age 62. “I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. Like, caught in this incredible, choiceless movie.”

In accordance with Krakower’s prophecy, Richard Beaumont, the director of Human Design UK, who worked closely with Krakower for years before his death has already purchased the domain name silentbabies.com. “There’s going to be a new species coming in February 2027,” he says, while sipping a glass of white wine in front of a human design chart over Zoom from his home in the west of England.

“They’re not going to be human, but they will come through human women.” (The human design school Krakower founded, the Jovian Archive, sells an online course centred on the alien prophecy for $2,079, and the organization warns of “imitators and unlicensed black marketeers” across the global network of licenses, trademarks and authorized teachers.) Human design is not a belief system, says Beaumont, who has 38,000 subscribers on his YouTube channel. “This is an endless knowledge … We’re not here to interfere with who we are; we’re here to decondition.”