The oxygen of publicity this year has mostly been consumed by our two-lettered friend, AI. There's no reason to think this will change in 2026. However, through the magic of journalism, here's a world where that's not true, a world where other things are happening that will shape the future. We like to call it the real world, and here's what's happening there and why it matters.

Structural battery composites

SBCs are, as they sound, materials that can create structural components in devices, vehicles, and buildings, while also acting as energy storage. Instead of an electric vehicle having a frame and a battery pack, the frame is the battery and the battery is the frame. Either way you think about it, one of the two biggest components has been eliminated. While lots of work has been done on carbon fiber and lithium composites, the technology has much greater potential for using different electrochemicals, as energy densities can be less without compromising functionality.

There are huge benefits to be realized. You're making one thing, not two, saving energy, reducing environmental impact, simplifying supply chains, and reducing costs. The geopolitical risks of relying on lithium from a small number of countries can be significantly reduced, and power storage – an essential component of the decarbonized energy future – extended into whole new fields.

Next-generation nuclear power

Although fusion power generation gets the headlines, there are still huge challenges before it becomes a significant energy source. Fission nuclear power has been feeding grids since the mid-1950s. Now two trends are combining to revitalize an industry starved of research for decades.

Generation IV reactors use novel coolants such as helium, liquid metals, and salts, operating at much higher temperatures than water-cooled plants but at much lower pressures. This simplifies the engineering and maintenance with increased efficiency, as well as increasing safety and sustainability. Seventy years of experience, good and bad, meets decades of advances in materials science.

The other component to nuclear power's renaissance is the small modular reactor concept, or SMR. Small nuclear plants also sport a mid-1950s vintage, when they started powering submarines, and they've been in service ever since. The modular aspect is new, making reactors out of standard components built on factory production lines. This shift away from massive, multibillion-dollar, decades-long nuclear projects fundamentally changes the economics and resilience of the sector.

Accessibility – not just a good idea, it's the law

European regulation on privacy, security, and interoperability has attracted most of the attention and ire from elsewhere, but another piece of legislation came into force in 2025. The European Accessibility Act (EAA) mandates all member states to make products and services equally accessible to all, with inaccessible systems banned from 2030. This means a new approach to design and implementation online and off is going to happen.

By enforcing equality of access for navigation, interaction, and consumption across the EU, the idea is that the cost of implementing accessible systems will come down, markets and jobs will become more open to more people, and everyday life will become better for more people. As it stands, accessibility is a hot mess, inconsistent, expensive, and often seen as an optional roadblock to innovation.

The EAA will enforce an economic, sustainable, industry-wide approach to meeting the new standards. It'll take a while, there will be pushback and spotty take-up, but the libraries and frameworks will get built. The industry will suddenly find it can do it after all, and life will be better and more accessible for all, no matter how able they are.

Cybersecurity mesh meets zero trust

These two ideas are on the long path from concepts through to philosophies into implementable standard-based realities. Cybersecurity mesh architecture (CSMA) is the idea that different components in an environment have different security needs, and different tools can both manage those and talk to each other about access patterns, behavior, requests, and so on. This is by way of establishing precise security policies, auditing, and monitoring.

Zero trust is the philosophy that nothing on a network, neither user nor device, can be assumed safe, but a verification pathway must be always available. This only works if the whole chain of access and delivery follows this idea – if an authentication service reports a user as verified but itself can't check, then that's a focus for attackers. CSMA provides possibilities for multiple independent verification paths for zero trust and can implement the policies to manage those, while zero trust gives CSMA the fundamental mechanism to provide a cohesive perception of who and what is active across a system.

These are evolving and to some extent overhyped concepts, but they offer a vision of intrinsically secure systems that can resist and minimize both socially engineered and technical vulnerability target attacks, and the overwhelming damaging effects if they succeed. How multiple syndicated authentication systems, biometrics, behavioral analysis, and multiple-factor authentication will evolve alongside these ideas is another matter, but they will because they must. The days when a hacker can phone up IT, get a password changed, and cause billions in economic damage have to stop. That's not a trend. That's survival. ®