In an era where manipulated videos can spread disinformation, bully people, and incite harm, researchers at the University of California, Riverside (UCR), have created a powerful new system to expose these fakes. Amit Roy-Chowdhury, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, and doctoral candidate Rohit Kundu, teamed up with Google scientists to develop an artificial intelligence model that detects video tampering – even when manipulations go far beyond face swaps and altered speech.

Their new system, called the Universal Network for Identifying Tampered and synthEtic videos (UNITE), detects forgeries by examining not just faces but full video frames, including backgrounds and motion patterns. This analysis makes it one of the first tools capable of identifying synthetic or doctored videos that do not rely on facial content.

“Deepfakes have evolved,” Kundu said. “They’re not just about face swaps anymore. People are now creating entirely fake videos – from faces to backgrounds – using powerful generative models. Our system is built to catch all of that.”

UNITE’s development comes as text-to-video and image-to-video generation have become widely available online. These AI platforms enable virtually anyone to fabricate highly convincing videos, posing serious risks to individuals, institutions, and democracy itself.

“It’s scary how accessible these tools have become,” Kundu said. “Anyone with moderate skills can bypass safety filters and generate realistic videos of public figures saying things they never said.”

Kundu explained that earlier deepfake detectors focused almost entirely on face cues. If there’s no face in the frame, many detectors simply don’t work. But disinformation can come in many forms. Altering a scene’s background can distort the truth just as easily.

To address this, UNITE uses a transformer-based deep learning model to analyze video clips. It detects subtle spatial and temporal inconsistencies – cues often missed by previous systems. The model draws on a foundational AI framework known as SigLIP, which extracts features not bound to a specific person or object. A novel training method, dubbed “attention-diversity loss,” prompts the system to monitor multiple visual regions in each frame, preventing it from focusing solely on faces.

The result is a universal detector capable of flagging a range of forgeries – from simple facial swaps to complex, fully synthetic videos generated without any real footage. It’s one model that handles all these scenarios,” Kundu said. “That’s what makes it universal.”

The researchers presented their findings at the high-ranking 2025 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in Nashville, Tenn. Their paper, led by Kundu, outlines UNITE’s architecture and training methodology.

While still in development, UNITE could soon play a vital role in defending against video disinformation. Potential users include social media platforms, fact-checkers, and newsrooms working to prevent manipulated videos from going viral.

“People deserve to know whether what they’re seeing is real,” Kundu said. “And as AI gets better at faking reality, we have to get better at revealing the truth.”

The scientific community has made a significant breakthrough in the field of quantum computing, as researchers from Aalto University in Finland have achieved a record-breaking millisecond coherence time for a transmon qubit. This achievement surpasses previous scientifically published records, marking a major leap forward in computational technology.

Longer qubit coherence allows for an extended window of time in which quantum computers can execute error-free operations, enabling more complex quantum computations and reducing the resources needed for quantum error correction. This is a crucial step towards noiseless quantum computing.

The researchers’ findings were published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications, with the team led by PhD student Mikko Tuokkola. The median reading of half a millisecond also surpasses current recorded readings, making this achievement even more impressive.

Finland’s position at the forefront of quantum science and technology has been cemented through this landmark achievement. The research was conducted by the Quantum Computing and Devices (QCD) group at Aalto University, which is part of the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Quantum Technology (QTF) and the Finnish Quantum Flagship (FQF).

The success reflects the high quality of Micronova cleanrooms at OtaNano, Finland’s national research infrastructure for micro-, nano-, and quantum technologies. Professor Mikko Möttönen, who heads the QCD group, stated that this achievement has strengthened Finland’s standing as a global leader in the field.

To further advance the field, the QCD group has recently opened positions for senior staff members and postdocs to achieve future breakthroughs faster. This commitment to innovation and collaboration will likely lead to even more significant advancements in quantum computing and its applications.

Imagine a world where technology could reveal hidden secrets just like magic. Scientists have made a breakthrough in creating artificial optical structures called metasurfaces that can control the way they interact with polarized light. This innovation has potential applications in data encryption, biosensing, and quantum technologies.

The team from the Bionanophotonic Systems Laboratory at EPFL’s School of Engineering collaborated with researchers in Australia to create a “chiral design toolkit” that is elegantly simple yet powerful. By varying the orientation of tiny elements called meta-atoms within a 2D lattice, scientists can control the resulting metasurface’s interaction with polarized light.

The innovation was showcased by encoding two different images on a metasurface optimized for the invisible mid-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The first image of an Australian cockatoo was encoded in the size of the meta-atoms, which represented pixels, and could be decoded with unpolarized light. The second image of the Swiss Matterhorn was encoded using the orientation of the meta-atoms, so that when exposed to circularly polarized light, the metasurface revealed a picture of the iconic mountain.

“This experiment showcased our technique’s ability to produce a dual layer ‘watermark’ invisible to the human eye, paving the way for advanced anticounterfeiting, camouflage and security applications,” says Ivan Sinev, researcher at the Bionanophotonics Systems Lab.

Beyond encryption, the team’s approach has potential applications in quantum technologies, where polarized light is used to perform computations. The ability to map chiral responses across large surfaces could also streamline biosensing.

“We can use chiral metastructures like ours to sense, for example, drug composition or purity from small-volume samples. Nature is chiral, and the ability to distinguish between left- and right-handed molecules is essential, as it could make the difference between a medicine and a toxin,” says Felix Richter, researcher at the Bionanophotonic Systems Lab.

This breakthrough has opened doors to new possibilities in data encryption, biosensing, and quantum technologies. The future of technology is indeed bright, and twisted light just got a whole lot more interesting.