Engineering researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed an advanced three-dimensional (3D) image projection system capable of displaying 28 distinct depth layers simultaneously in a single optical exposure.
Led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan from the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering and the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), the project introduces a compact framework designed to enhance next-generation holographic displays, medical imaging, and virtual reality interfaces.
The research details a hybrid digital-optical architecture that resolves persistent issues of visual distortion and cross-talk in dense 3D imaging.
Traditional multi-layer volumetric projection methods often suffer from image degradation when multiple focal planes are closely spaced. As these layers converge, the light fields often bleed into one another, reducing depth clarity, causing severe blurriness, and diminishing visual sharpness for the viewer.
Deep learning and light programming
To overcome these limitations, the UCLA research team utilized deep learning to co-optimize a digital computational encoder alongside a passive, physical optical decoder.
The system functions by running target visual data through a digital neural network that incorporates explicit depth and coordinate instructions. This network compresses the multi-layered structural information into a singular, unified phase pattern that represents the entire 3D volume.
When light passes through the system, it hits a series of structurally optimized diffractive surfaces that act as an analog decoder. These surfaces physically manipulate the light wave, routing specific components of the image to their exact pre-assigned depth planes.
This precise “light programming” allows the system to suppress data leakage between adjacent layers, maintaining clean visual separation even when planes are separated by distances near the scale of a single light wavelength.
Scalability and experimental validation
Through numerical modeling, the team demonstrated that the framework scales effectively to accommodate complex volumetric scenes split into 28 independent axial slices.
Additionally, the system features a dynamic adjustment capability, allowing operators to alter the target depth positions of the projected images on demand without modifying the core physical architecture.
To confirm the practical viability of this digital-optical pipeline, the researchers built a physical, two-plane hardware prototype that uses a single-layer optical decoder operating in the visible light spectrum.
Experimental measurements confirmed that the projected light distribution closely matched both the target designs and computational simulations. The experimental setup significantly outperformed unassisted free-space optical systems, validating the real-world stability and accuracy of the design.
Future tech integration
The compact layout of this encoder-decoder architecture provides an energy-efficient foundation for high-resolution volumetric imaging. Beyond immediate integration into near-eye augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) headsets, the technology holds potential applications in multi-depth microscopy, real-time 3D medical visualization, and optical computing.
Moving forward, the research team aims to expand the capabilities of this framework by exploring multispectral operations to support full-color projections, multi-perspective holography, and the integration of physically fabricated multi-layer decoders suitable for commercial manufacturing form factors.
A new ultra-efficient DNA splicing method developed by a Japanese research team using silver nanoparticles offers a dramatic improvement to how scientists stitch genetic blueprints together, with implications for future developments in genetics.
In animal models for drug research, crop breeding, and disease treatment, scientists cut and recombine DNA segments, traditionally relying on “sticky ends,” the overhanging bits left at the ends of the sequences to create a stable join.
Now, researchers at Japan’s Nagoya University and Gifu University have announced a much more precise silver nanoparticle-based solution for DNA cutting and joining in a recent paper published in Nucleic Acids Research, enabling incredible precision.
DNA Splicing Challenges
The sticky ends required in traditional splicing techniques come with significant drawbacks. In these methods, restriction enzymes cut DNA, which is then reattached using T4 DNA ligase. Unfortunately, restriction enzymes lack precision, often producing sticky ends that are not long enough to create an optimal join.
Professor Hiroshi Abe and Assistant Professor Masahito Inagaki at Nagoya University, in collaboration with Professor Natsuhisa Oka at Gifu University, led the effort to improve the efficiency of DNA splicing. The team focused on cutting DNA segments using chemical reactions rather than the restriction enzymes typically employed, drawing inspiration from decades-old research.
Between 1990 and 1992, researchers reported successfully cutting 3′-thiol-modified DNA at specific locations using silver ions.
“Although it had been known for a long time, it was never put to practical use, and we recognized that it could be the key to our goal of creating sticky ends of any length and sequence at any position we choose,” Hiroshi told The Debrief.
Rethinking Old Work
However, this method was impractical because nonspecific binding of silver ions resulted in only a 14% recovery rate.’ The researchers’ breakthrough came from substituting silver nanoparticles for silver ions, aiming to improve DNA recovery by removing them via centrifugation after the reaction was over.
“The turning point was to turn this problem of ‘how to remove the silver’ to our advantage,” Hiroshi explained. “We reasoned that if the silver were in the form of nanoparticles, it could be removed easily by centrifugation after the reaction, greatly improving recovery.”
Another problem quickly arose, as cleaving efficiency required temperatures and durations that were hazardous to the DNA itself. At 70°C, the DNA achieved only 50% efficiency, whereas it took 2 hours at 95°C to reach something approaching 100% efficiency.
Polyethylene glycol (PEG), a water-soluble polymer, provided the solution the researchers required. Coating the silver nanoparticles with PEG increased efficiency at a mere 37°C for two hours, from 36% to 92%.
“In the end, we optimized the conditions to a practical level and, under ambient temperatures, achieved PEG-modified cleaving efficiency above 91% at 50°C within just one to two hours,” Inagaki said.
A Powerful DNA Editing Breakthrough
The new silver nanoparticle technique improves DNA assembly efficiency by two to five times. Crucially, their work is not theoretical: the team successfully introduced a DNA fragment into live cells, confirming expression of a green fluorescent protein gene.
“We have shown that two DNA fragments can be joined. Now, we need to confirm whether multiple fragments can be joined at the same time—a key step for building genome-scale DNA,” Ingaki said.
The researchers will continue to pursue this new splicing method, both to explore its potential for advanced applications and to consider bringing the technique into routine use.
“To make it a routine, everyday tool, the remaining tasks are to verify reproducibility across a wide range of sequences, to scale up to longer DNA, and to develop standardized, kit-format protocols that anyone can follow,” Hiroshi said. “We see these as engineering and optimization challenges rather than fundamental barriers, and we believe they can be overcome.”
“Our next goal is to extend this technique to longer DNA and, ultimately, to genome-scale DNA assembly,” Hiroshi concluded. “Specifically, we plan to apply it to the construction of mRNA libraries and the synthesis of long-chain DNA encoding therapeutic proteins, while also working on automation and standardization, so that it can grow into a foundational technology actually used in the fields of synthetic biology and nucleic acid medicine.”
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.
One of fusion energy’s biggest selling points is that it is supposed to be different from traditional nuclear power.
Unlike today’s fission reactors, which rely on uranium fuel and produce materials that can be linked to nuclear weapons programs, fusion machines are often portrayed as a cleaner and safer alternative.
However, as governments and companies pour billions of dollars into making fusion commercially viable, some researchers are asking a burning question: How will anyone ensure that future fusion plants are being used exactly as advertised?
This is important because “fusion power systems can in principle be used to make significant amounts of fissile material,” researchers note.
A new study suggests antineutrinos, tiny particles produced in nuclear reactions, could act as independent witnesses to what is happening inside a fusion reactor. If this idea works as expected, future inspectors may be able to spot attempts to produce weapons-related materials without opening up the reactor or interrupting its operation.
When clean energy creates an unexpected security question
Most fusion designs under development rely on a reaction between two forms of hydrogen called deuterium and tritium. When these atomic nuclei merge, they release enormous amounts of energy.
They also release fast-moving neutrons, which are essential for extracting that energy and converting it into electricity. Those neutrons, however, do not care how they are used.
If uranium-238 were placed near the fusion reaction, some of the neutrons could be absorbed by the uranium. Through a sequence of nuclear transformations, the uranium could eventually become plutonium-239, one of the materials that can be used in nuclear weapons.
This possibility does not mean that fusion reactors are secret weapons factories. Producing plutonium in this way would require deliberate action. Yet regulators generally prefer to design safeguards before a technology becomes widespread rather than after.
“Demonstrating methods to assure the timely detection of such a misuse scenario would be extremely valuable as part of the efforts to guarantee the peaceful use of fusion energy systems,” the study authors said.
The challenge has been finding a monitoring method that can reliably reveal what is happening inside a reactor without becoming intrusive or technically impractical.
Listening for particles that cannot be silenced
The study authors investigated whether antineutrinos could provide that monitoring capability.
Antineutrinos are among the most elusive particles known to science.
Trillions pass through the human body every second without leaving a trace. Since they interact so weakly with matter, they cannot realistically be blocked by walls, shielding, or other barriers.
That property turns them into a unique source of information. If plutonium production were taking place inside a fusion reactor, the nuclear reactions involved would generate a characteristic antineutrino signal. In principle, that signal could reveal activity that operators might otherwise try to conceal.
The researchers used computer simulations to test whether such a signal would be detectable in practice. They modeled the antineutrinos expected from plutonium-producing reactions and compared them with other sources of background noise, including signals generated during normal reactor operation and particles arriving from space.
Their results indicate that the difference should be measurable. According to the study, a relatively compact detector could detect the production of only a few kilograms of plutonium over about 30 days.
In one benchmark scenario examined by the researchers, the production of 8 kilograms of plutonium in a month generated a strong and easily detectable antineutrino signal. This is a small enough amount to provide an early warning that something unusual is happening.
“Our results confirm that even a modestly-sized antineutrino detector should be able to detect the presence of fertile material during operation in a reliable and timely manner,” the study authors added.
Equally important, the detector would not need to sit inside the reactor complex. This is because antineutrinos travel through matter almost unhindered; the monitoring system could operate from outside the facility, making it less disruptive for reactor operators.
Building the rulebook before the reactors arrive
No commercial deuterium-tritium fusion power plants exist today, which means there is currently no facility where the approach can be tested under full operating conditions. The researchers therefore relied on simulations rather than real-world measurements.
That limitation also highlights why the study matters now. Fusion developers are still working to prove that their reactors can generate electricity economically.
If they succeed, governments and international agencies will eventually need a framework for monitoring the technology. Creating such safeguards after hundreds of reactors are already operating would be far more difficult.
The new work does not solve every question surrounding fusion security, but it does offer a practical way to verify that future reactors are doing only what they are supposed to do.
The study is published in the journal Physical Review Applied.
Scientists have created the first complete brain-to-body wiring map of a fruit fly, revealing that complex behavior may arise from distributed neural teamwork rather than a central controller. A large international research team led by labs at Harvard Medical School and Princeton University has reached a major neuroscience milestone: a complete wiring diagram of every [...]
Early in the 11th century, a young Benedictine monk named Eilmer jumped from the 150-foot tower of his abbey in the small English town of Malmesbury, wearing a pair of crude wings he’d fashioned from willow wood and cloth. Eilmer managed to glide a good 600 feet, passing over the city wall before crash-landing in a small valley near the river Avon. The fall broke both his legs, crippling him. Malmesbury Abbey still boasts a stained-glass window in honor of Brother Eilmer.
This legendary experiment in medieval aviation comes to us via 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury in an account written circa 1125, although William neglected to provide future historians with an exact date for the feat. But William does mention another key episode in Eilmer's life when the monk was "advanced in years": Eilmer witnessed Halley's comet in 1066, commenting, "It is long since I saw you." Some historians have interpreted this to mean that Eilmer saw Halley's comet on an earlier fly-by in 989, when he would have been a young boy.
Assuming Eilmer was at least 5 years old in 989, he would have been born no later than 984. This would make Eilmer in his 80s in 1066, with his attempt at flight—which occurred when he was "in his first youth"—likely falling between 1000 and 1010. However, it's an estimate that is based on a lot of assumptions, according to James Aitcheson of the University of Leicester, who argues in a paper published in the journal Notes and Queries that Eilmer may have seen a different comet altogether in his youth—the comet of 1018. If so, he would have been born much later, and the date of his flight would have occurred between the 1020s and 1040s.
Scientists discovered that the brain begins preparing for social connection before we even make the first move. Why do we decide to approach other people? According to new research, the answer may start unfolding in the brain several seconds before any movement takes place. A team of scientists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has [...]
For more than three centuries, physicists have believed in Isaac Newton’s third law—every action has an equal and opposite reaction. However, many real-world collective systems appear to ignore this rule.
For example, a bird in a flock pays attention mainly to birds in front of it, not those behind. Cells moving through tissue respond to some neighbors but not others. Swarming bacteria and even human crowds often behave in similarly one-sided ways.
These nonreciprocal interactions have long posed a challenge because many of the mathematical tools physicists use assume that action and reaction are balanced.
Now, a new study presents a framework that effectively restores access to those powerful tools without changing the underlying physics. This work could make it much easier to study flocking animals, active matter, biological tissues, and potentially even exotic quantum systems.
“We have developed and proven a theory that makes much of what we teach our students applicable to nonreciprocal systems as well,” said Marin Bukov, one of the study authors and a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems.
These systems, where Newton’s third law does not apply, can now finally be described exactly and simulated precisely—even using established methods. This is exactly the kind of tool that has been missing in recent years,” Bukov added.
What’s wrong with birds in a flock
In conventional systems, interactions can be described by an energy function, allowing researchers to use well-established methods from statistical mechanics and many-body physics.
Nonreciprocal systems are different. If one bird responds to another but not vice versa, there is no single interaction energy that describes the pair. Without that energy landscape, many standard analytical and computational approaches become unavailable.
Scientists could still simulate the systems directly, but the calculations were often slower, less flexible, and harder to interpret. A general framework capable of handling nonreciprocal interactions while preserving the advantages of traditional physics had remained elusive.
Restoring Newton-like symmetry
The researchers solved the problem by introducing what they call auxiliary degrees of freedom. In simple terms, every real component in a nonreciprocal system is paired with an artificial counterpart that exists only in mathematics.
The key idea is surprisingly simple. Instead of changing the physics, the researchers add mathematical partners to every real component in the system.
“The trick behind the new theory is that it constructs a partner for each component of the system—a fictitious partner that doesn’t exist in nature,” Ricard Alert, one of the study authors and a biophysicist at the Max Planck Institute, said.
Imagine a flock of birds. Instead of modeling only the real birds, the framework adds a second set of fictional birds. These imaginary birds are carefully defined so that the originally one-way interactions can be rewritten as ordinary two-way interactions between real and auxiliary partners.
The resulting enlarged system obeys the reciprocal rules that physicists know how to handle. Once a specific constraint is imposed, the mathematical model reproduces the exact behavior of the original nonreciprocal flock.
The idea resembles a common strategy in theoretical physics, where extra variables are introduced to simplify difficult problems.
What makes this work different is that the auxiliary variables provide a general recipe for translating nonreciprocal interactions into a form compatible with Hamiltonian mechanics—a mathematical framework physicists use to predict how complex systems evolve over time.
Putting the framework to the test
To demonstrate the approach, the team studied a model known as the vision-cone XY model. In this system, each element interacts only with neighbors that fall within a specific field of view, much like birds paying attention only to those ahead of them.
Since one bird can see another without being seen in return, the interaction is inherently nonreciprocal. The researchers showed that by adding an auxiliary partner for every element and enforcing a mirror-like relationship between the two, the original dynamics emerge exactly from a Hamiltonian description.
The payoff was immediate. The team proved that Monte Carlo simulations based on the new Hamiltonian framework reproduced both steady and changing states of the original nonreciprocal system.
This means scientists can now apply computational techniques that were previously reserved for conventional reciprocal systems. In practice, researchers may be able to analyze much larger systems more efficiently and explore behaviors that were previously difficult to access.
The framework also unlocked another powerful tool, Floquet engineering, a technique that uses periodic driving to manipulate interactions.
Using their new formulation, the researchers showed how a periodically driven nonreciprocal spin system could effectively be transformed from a two-dimensional network into behavior resembling a collection of one-dimensional chains. Such control would have been difficult to analyze without a Hamiltonian description.
“Overall, our construction paves the way towards extending statistical mechanics and Hamiltonian dynamics to non-reciprocal systems,” the study authors note.
A bridge to new physics, but not the final answer
The framework gives physicists a new way to study nonreciprocal systems using many of the established tools developed for conventional physics. Beyond flocking birds and moving cells, it could help researchers analyze a wide range of systems where interactions are one-sided.
Currently, the approach applies to pairwise interactions and introduces an auxiliary partner for every real component, making more complex systems a challenge for future work.
Looking ahead, the study authors want to explore whether nonreciprocal interactions can produce entirely new forms of collective quantum behavior.
If so, the framework could open a new window into how complex matter organizes itself when the usual action-reaction symmetry breaks down.
The study is published in the journal Nature Physics.
President Donald Trump says a secret mission moved 100 million barrels of oil through the blocked Strait of Hormuz. That number is impossible to verify.
In 2020, scientists reported that they had drilled into sediment beneath the South Pacific Gyre and recovered microbes from layers as old as 101.5 million years. The sediment had been laid down in the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs still dominated the land. The cells were buried in one of the poorest habitats on Earth, with almost no food arriving from the ocean above. Yet many of them were still viable.
Given nutrients under oxygen-bearing laboratory conditions, the cells reactivated. They took up carbon and nitrogen and began to divide. They are among the oldest microbial communities anyone has revived from a near-dormant, ultra-slow state.
Where the sediment came from
The samples were collected in 2010, during Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 329, aboard the research drillship JOIDES Resolution. The target was the abyssal plain of the South Pacific Gyre, a stretch of open ocean far from any land, under about 5,700 metres of water. The team drilled around 75 metres into the seafloor and recovered sediment spanning from 4.3 to 101.5 million years old.
The South Pacific Gyre was chosen because it is, biologically, close to empty. It is the least productive part of the ocean, the region with the fewest nutrients feeding the marine food web. So little organic matter rains down onto the seabed there that the sediment never runs out of oxygen. Most deep sediment is oxygen-free within centimetres of the seafloor, because microbes consume the oxygen as they break down organic material. Here there is so little to break down that oxygen reaches all the way down to the underlying rock.
That oxic condition turned out to matter, because it is aerobic, oxygen-using microbes that the study found had survived.
What they did, and what they measured
The test was direct. The researchers, led by Yuki Morono of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, incubated the old sediment with carbon and nitrogen compounds that had been tagged with heavy isotopes, so that any cell taking them up would carry a detectable label. The incubations were run under low-oxygen, microaerobic conditions, with about 3.3 per cent oxygen, in keeping with the naturally oxygenated sediment. Then they looked, cell by cell, to see which cells were eating.
They examined 6,986 individual cells using a technique called NanoSIMS, which measures the isotopic make-up of single cells. Most of the cells had taken up the labelled carbon and nitrogen. In the paper, published in Nature Communications, the team reported that the populations grew by four orders of magnitude within 68 days of incubation, and that uptake of nitrogen was on average about three times faster than uptake of carbon. In the oldest sediment, the estimated revivable heterotrophic fraction ranged as high as 99.1 per cent.
The revival was specific. Aerobic microbes came back readily. Anaerobic ones, which do not use oxygen, were barely revived at all, consistent with an environment that had held oxygen the whole time.
Dormant, or just very slow
The headline version of this is that the microbes lay dormant for a hundred million years and then woke up.
The careful version is a little different.
What the dating establishes is the age of the sediment, not a stopwatch on any single cell. The reasonable inference is that the microbial community was buried with the sediment and persisted in place ever since, but the study does not prove that each cell is literally 101.5 million years old. Whether the cells were truly suspended, with metabolism switched off, or ticking over at a rate too slow to measure, is not something the study fully resolves. Research on energy-starved life beneath the seafloor suggests these organisms live at metabolic rates far below anything seen in a normal laboratory culture, slow enough that the line between sleeping and barely living starts to blur. What the experiment shows cleanly is that the cells retained the machinery to recover once conditions allowed.
Why the contamination controls matter
Claims about extremely ancient revived microbes have a difficult history, because the obvious failure mode is contamination. A modern cell that slips into a sample during drilling or handling can masquerade as an ancient survivor. An earlier and much-cited claim, of bacteria revived from a 250-million-year-old salt crystal, reported by Russell Vreeland and colleagues in Nature in 2000, has been disputed for exactly this reason. Critics noted that the revived strain’s genetic sequence was almost identical to a modern salt-loving bacterium, which is hard to reconcile with a 250-million-year separation and points instead to contamination.
This is where the South Pacific Gyre work is stronger than most. The team tracked chemical tracers from the drilling fluid and found contamination minimal, below detection in some key samples. Morono’s group is also known for stringent clean handling, and the single-cell isotope method adds another layer: it does not merely show that something grew after incubation, it shows that the specific cells present in the old sediment took up the labelled food. That makes the case that these were genuinely the buried organisms, rather than later arrivals, harder to dismiss. It is why the result sits among the better-evidenced of the very old revivals, even though older claims exist.
What it changes
The reach of the finding is in what it implies about the limits of life. If aerobic microbes can persist for a hundred million years on almost no energy, sealed in cold sediment with oxygen and little else, then the conditions under which life can hold on are broader than a tally of thriving ecosystems would suggest. Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island, a senior author, put the point plainly in the university’s announcement: in the oldest, least nourished sediment they had drilled, there were still living organisms able to wake up, grow and multiply.
That has a bearing beyond Earth. Places that look inhospitable because they are starved of energy, such as the cold subsurface of Mars or the interiors of icy moons, are exactly the kind of setting where this study suggests life, if it ever started, might simply wait. The open questions now are mechanical: how a cell holds itself together for such spans, what minimal trickle of energy it needs, and how slow a living thing can go without crossing over into being a dead one. The microbes from beneath the gyre do not answer those questions. They make them harder to wave away.
The ban was supposed to last two months. The fraud lasted sixteen more months.
By June 2020, Wirecard had collapsed with €1.9 billion missing from its balance sheet, money the company later admitted probably did not exist. The reporters were right. The people betting against the stock were right. The regulator had spent a crucial stretch treating the warning lights as the threat.
The ban that had no precedent
The order was narrow and strange. BaFin prohibited the creation or increase of net short positions in Wirecard shares from February 18 to April 18, 2019, citing a threat to market confidence in Germany. The European Securities and Markets Authority approved the emergency measure, but even that approval made clear how unusual the intervention was: a market-wide tool applied to one listed company.
Short-sellers were not attacking a healthy business at random. They were betting that Wirecard’s accounts did not add up. By February 2019, Dan McCrum at the Financial Times had spent years reporting on suspicious accounting at the German payments company, including claims about its Asian subsidiaries and documents from a whistleblower in Singapore.
The stock fell hard. BaFin’s response was to protect the falling stock, not to make the accounting allegations the center of its own public action.
A regulator picking a side
The short-selling ban was the clearest signal, but it was not the only one. BaFin also filed criminal complaints against two Financial Times journalists on suspicion of market manipulation, alleging that reporting on Wirecard may have been coordinated with short-sellers.
That accusation hung over McCrum and his colleague Stefania Palma while the company they were investigating continued to trade as a German technology champion. Years later, BaFin’s own leadership would describe the Wirecard episode as a failure that changed how the agency approached supervision.
Wirecard had also gone after the paper directly. As Business Insider reported in March 2019, the company sued over the Financial Times coverage, claiming the articles misused or misrepresented business secrets. The regulator’s posture lined up neatly with the company’s.
The inversion was stark. A financial watchdog exists to protect investors from false markets. In Wirecard’s case, the watchdog protected a false market from the people saying it was false.
The thing BaFin did not look at
The Financial Times stories were specific. They described possible round-tripping, a method in which money is moved through a chain of entities to create the appearance of real revenue. They named people, places, documents, and subsidiaries. The allegations were not vague market gossip.
BaFin treated the leak and the share-price fall as the market problem. The deeper question was whether Wirecard’s reported profits and cash balances were real.
That question was left largely to the company’s auditors and to the structure of German accounting enforcement. EY had signed off on Wirecard’s accounts for years. When KPMG was later brought in for a special review, its April 2020 report was unable to resolve central questions around the third-party acquiring business that had supposedly generated much of Wirecard’s profit.
The missing money was said to be held in escrow accounts in the Philippines. By the time anyone outside Wirecard could not verify those accounts, the fraud was almost at its end.
The Philippine banks BDO and BPI said documents purporting to show Wirecard accounts at their institutions were false. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas said the missing funds had not entered the Philippine financial system. The escrow accounts were ghosts. The cash had never been there.
Jan Marsalek, Wirecard’s chief operating officer and the executive closest to the supposed Asian partners, disappeared in late June. Germany’s federal criminal police later listed him in a wanted notice connected to suspected fraud, breach of trust, and other economic offences.
The reporter the state tried to prosecute
McCrum had begun looking at Wirecard in 2014, after questions surfaced about margins that seemed too high for the payments business Wirecard claimed to run. His first major series ran in 2015. For the next five years, he and other Financial Times reporters worked through shell entities, fake-looking clients, and bank confirmations that did not hold up.
During that period, McCrum was placed under surveillance by private investigators hired by Wirecard. He was also one of the journalists targeted by the criminal complaint triggered by BaFin’s suspicions. The New Yorker’s 2023 reconstruction described how much of the German establishment treated the reporting as an attack on a national champion rather than as a warning.
There’s a detailed video by Silicon Canals that traces the full arc of this scandal, including the intelligence connections that made it one of Europe’s most brazen frauds. It is worth a look for the broader context beyond the regulatory failure.
The criminal investigation into the journalists produced no charges. Wirecard produced no money in the Philippine accounts. The market eventually priced in what BaFin had tried to suppress.
What the precedent left behind
The deeper part of the story became stranger after Marsalek vanished. Later reporting connected him to Russian intelligence circles and to sensitive material linked to the Novichok nerve agent used in the 2018 Salisbury attack. What had looked like an accounting scandal widened into a story about espionage, surveillance, and state power.
In March 2025, an Old Bailey jury convicted three Bulgarians of spying for Russia in a case prosecutors said was directed by Marsalek from Moscow. The court heard that the network targeted journalists, dissidents, and military sites across Europe.
BaFin has not repeated the Wirecard single-stock short-selling ban. Felix Hufeld, BaFin’s president at the time, resigned in January 2021. Germany later reworked financial reporting supervision and gave BaFin a more direct role over listed-company accounts.
The fraud now sits in the record as one of the largest in postwar German corporate history. The regulatory failure sits beside it as a warning about institutional reflexes: when the first instinct is to defend confidence, the thing being defended may be the illusion itself.
The short-selling ban expired on April 18, 2019. By then the fraud had fifteen months left to run. The reporters kept publishing. The money kept not being in the Philippines. And somewhere around Wirecard’s orbit, Marsalek was already moving toward the vanishing point.
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