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Search Launches for the UK’s Next Generation of STEM Innovators

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The National STEM Festival expands internationally for the first time, seeking young innovators from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

LONDON, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Across the UK, teenagers are thinking about extraordinary solutions to problems in their communities and the wider world. Their ideas reflect the remarkable depth of young talent and innovation in the UK. The National STEM Festival wants to find these young innovators and give them a public stage to showcase their ideas, expand their ambitions and shape the future.

Applications are now open for the UK’s first National STEM Festival, a nationwide search for young innovators ages 13–19. 40 students from England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will be selected as National STEM Champions and invited to showcase their projects during the Festival, taking place 5–10 May 2027 in London. Travel and accommodation will be fully funded for every Champion, helping ensure that cost, location or access to established STEM networks does not prevent a promising young innovator from participating.

An additional highlight of the Festival is Open Build Weekend, a free, all-ages public experience where families, educators and industry leaders can meet the Champions, experience their projects firsthand and take part in hands-on activities — including challenges from Taskmaster Education, with additional programme partners to be announced.

The UK Festival marks the first international expansion of the National STEM Festival following three successful years in the United States. Powered by EXPLR, and supported by leading industry, academic and governing institutions, the UK edition is being developed to reflect the distinct experiences, opportunities and challenges facing young people throughout the four nations.

“This Festival will feel genuinely connected— built around the young people and communities across the UK. Extraordinary ideas can come from anywhere, but access to opportunity doesn’t. We want to find the next generation whose ideas deserve to be seen, supported and taken seriously,” said Jenny Buccos, Founder of the National STEM Festival. “At the same time, the Festival is about helping address some of the UK’s longer-term challenges — from the skills gap and youth unemployment to unlocking growth and innovation in communities across the UK.”

Students may submit projects addressing real-world challenges in four categories:

Building & InfrastructureHealth & Human PotentialTechnology, AI & Digital FuturesFood, Planet & Sustainability

“Young people have the best ideas, but too often those ideas never reach beyond the home or the classroom,” said science broadcaster and author Dallas Campbell. “This Festival gives them a national stage with an audience of scientists, engineers, and industry leaders who understand the potential of a great idea. I cannot wait to see what the UK’s young innovators are already imagining and building.”

The nationwide search comes at an important moment for the UK. Skills England projects that priority occupations — jobs identified as particularly important to the UK’s skills needs — will require approximately 900,000 additional workers by 2030, a 15% increase and growth roughly 1.6 times faster than other occupations. By identifying, encouraging and connecting talented young innovators with STEM leaders and opportunities, the Festival aims to help inspire and prepare the next generation of the UK’s STEM workforce.

Festival week will take place across four London venues: the Houses of Parliament, The Shard, RSA House and the Leake Street Tunnels.

The Festival’s first announced partners include UK Parliament, Warwick Manufacturing Group, Warwick Business School, Oxford Brookes University, Cardiff & Vale University Health Board, micro:bit, and OPSWAT, with additional partners to be announced.

Festival Details

WHO:
Students ages 13–19 in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

WHAT:
Applications for the UK’s first National STEM Festival. Up to 40 National STEM Champions will be selected across four project categories, with travel and accommodation in London fully funded.

WHEN:
Applications open: Wednesday, 16 September 2026
Applications close: Sunday, 22 November 2026
Festival: 5–10 May 2027

Open Build Days (Public Access): 8-9 May 2027

WHERE:
London venues including the Houses of Parliament, The Shard, RSA House and the Leake Street Tunnels

HOW TO APPLY:
Visit: https://www.nationalstemfestival.com/apply-uk-2027

About National STEM Festival UK

The National STEM Festival UK edition, powered by EXPLR, is a national celebration of the next generation of innovators, bringing together exceptional students ages 13-19 from across the United Kingdom to showcase groundbreaking STEM projects addressing real-world challenges. The Festival connects young innovators with leaders across industry, government, education and science, providing a national platform to recognize their achievements, amplify their ideas and inspire the future of STEM.

Media Contact: Igor Merheim-Eyre, teamEXPLR@actumllc.com

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Nozomi Networks Introduces Nozomi Compass to Modernize the Everyday Work of OT Asset and Service Management

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Pairs the industry’s deepest first-party OT asset data to guide OT-safe change and remediation workflowsDelivers continuous compliance evidence, safer change governance, and real risk reductionEmpowers critical infrastructure operators to act, and prove they acted, at the speed the AI-risk era demands

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Nozomi Networks, the leader in operational technology (OT), Internet of Things (IoT), and cyber-physical systems (CPS) security, today announced Nozomi Compass, an OT-native asset and service management platform built for a new reality. AI has collapsed the time it takes to discover vulnerabilities, anomalies, and exposures across industrial environments from months to minutes. Yet, acting on them still runs through spreadsheets, IT ticketing tools, and manual processes never designed for OT. Nozomi Compass closes that gap. 

“Nozomi Compass underpins our vision to provide a single source of truth for visibility, threat detection, governed workflows, compliance evidence, and trusted AI-enabled operational decision-making,” said Andrea Carcano, CEO and Co-Founder of Nozomi Networks. “Until now, operators have been working with an ineffective IT-native toolset to service their OT assets. As industrial organizations incorporate AI automation to keep pace with today’s threat and regulatory landscape, they cannot live in the unknown. Compass is the foundation that allows teams to move quickly with confidence.”

Built on Nozomi’s real-time, first-party asset data, Compass gives industrial organizations a real-time OT system of record and process-safe workflows to plan, approve, execute, and prove every change. As vulnerability discovery continues to outpace manual remediation, this framework of unified CPS security and OT service management gives industrial organizations the source of truth they need. It is the foundation for safely adopting autonomous and agentic OT and IoT workflows grounded in real operational and threat context with a human always part of the process. Nozomi Compass turns AI-speed action into governed, auditable outcomes without risking uptime or safety.

Key capabilities of Nozomi Compass will include:

A trusted OT system of record: Built on Nozomi’s real-time, first-party OT and IoT asset data, replacing stale spreadsheets, imported records, and IT-first configuration databases with a single current source of truth.OT-native workflows: Purpose-built for how industrial environments operate, incorporating OT-safe processes, Purdue-level relationships, safety criticality, and full lifecycle history into every asset record and workflow logic.Governed change and risk decisions: Live risk and safety context, traceable approvals, consequence-based risk scoring, and compensating controls create a defensible record of what was authorized, changed, and completed.Continuous compliance evidence: Audit-ready evidence mapped to frameworks including NERC CIP, IEC 62443, NIS2 and TSA, generated continuously to reduce manual effort.An open foundation for enterprise workflows and AI: Governed OT data flows into the EAM, CMDB, ITAM, ITSM, SIEM and SOAR tools customers already run, while giving AI-driven tools the clean, contextual OT data they need to operate safely.

Nozomi Compass marks the next step in Nozomi’s platform vision to unify cyber-physical systems security and operational technology service management on a single foundation that gives customers the confidence they understand what is happening across their operational environment and control what happens next. Rather than retrofitting a generic IT platform for OT service management, Compass is built directly on the same real-time asset intelligence that powers Vantage, Nozomi’s cyber-physical security platform, giving customers a unified, current system of record and action.

“OT and IT service management have always spoken different languages,” said Moreno Carullo, Co-founder and CTO at Nozomi Networks. “Nozomi Compass is purpose-built around how industrial operations work, including safety windows, process dependencies, and physical consequences, so teams can finally govern change and prove compliance without forcing OT data into an IT-shaped box.”

Nozomi Compass will be available to Nozomi Networks customers in January. For more information visit the Nozomi Compass page.

About Nozomi Networks
Nozomi Networks protects the world’s critical infrastructure from cyber threats. Our platform uniquely combines network and endpoint visibility, threat detection, and AI-powered analysis for faster, more effective incident response. Customers rely on us to minimize risk and complexity while maximizing operational resilience. www.nozominetworks.com

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SOURCE Nozomi Networks

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Nona Biosciences Successfully Develops World’s First Language Model Trained on Fully Human Heavy-Chain-Only Antibodies

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Nona Biosciences (“Nona”), a global biotechnology company advancing biologics discovery and development through innovative technology platforms, today announced the development of HCAbLM, the world’s first language model specifically trained on fully human heavy-chain-only antibodies (HCAbs). HCAbLM was built on a large-scale repertoire comprising 31.8 million fully human HCAb sequences from 73 independently immunized HCAb transgenic mice. The study, “A foundation model learns the sequence and functional grammar of fully human heavy-chain-only antibodies,” was published in bioRxiv.

From Binder to Drug Candidate: A Leap in AI Antibody Development

The main bottleneck in the current AI antibody field is no longer “whether an antibody that binds the target can be designed,” but rather “whether the designed antibody can be manufactured at scale, whether it will aggregate, and whether it is stable”—that is, developability. HCAbLM was created precisely to address this issue. The model has learned the “sequence grammar” unique to fully human HCAbs—a set of underlying rules that determine whether an antibody can fold, exist stably, and ultimately become a drug. Conventional general-purpose models cannot capture this set of rules because their training data contain almost no HCAb sequences. HCAbLM fully demonstrates that a dedicated model trained on unique antibody sequence data can better translate sequence space cognition into developability prediction.

A Dedicated HCAb Model Outperforms General-Purpose Protein and Antibody Models

The representations learned by HCAbLM demonstrate transferability to experimentally measured antibody properties, including size exclusion chromatography (SEC) purity, hydrophobic interaction chromatography (HIC) behavior, and thermal stability, highlighting HCAbLM’s potential in the evaluation and optimization of fully human HCAbs, going beyond mere sequence analysis.

In public benchmarks for cross-project developability prediction, HCAbLM, with only 366 million parameters, surpassed general-purpose protein large models including Meta’s ESM-6B with 6 billion parameters, as well as previously leading antibody language models IgLM and AbLang, on two core metrics: SEC purity and HIC behavior.

The development of HCAbLM marks an important advancement in Nona’s application of artificial intelligence (AI) to antibody discovery and development. By combining large-scale antibody repertoires with AI-driven modeling, Nona is building a foundation for more efficient and data-driven antibody design and developability assessment.

“The development of HCAbLM represents an important step in our efforts to apply AI to specialized antibody formats and unlock the value of large-scale antibody repertoires,” said Dr. Di Hong, Chief Executive Officer of Nona Biosciences. “By learning the unique sequence characteristics of fully human HCAbs and demonstrating transferability to experimentally measured molecular properties, HCAbLM provides a new foundation for AI-enabled antibody discovery and development. We look forward to further integrating HCAbLM with Nona’s technology platforms, and leveraging these capabilities to accelerate antibody discovery and development while empowering our partners to unlock new opportunities for next-generation biotherapeutics.”

About Nona Biosciences

Nona Biosciences, a wholly owned subsidiary of HBM Holding Limited (HKEX:02142), is a global biotechnology company committed to advancing biotherapeutic innovation through cutting-edge technology platforms and integrated solutions. Nona supports programs with its I to I® framework, from early-stage ideas through preclinical research and advancement toward IND and early clinic, spanning target validation and antibody discovery to early development.

Nona’s proprietary Harbour Mice® technology platform generates fully human monoclonal antibodies in classical two light and two heavy chain (H2L2) format, and heavy chain-only (HCAb) format. The HCAb Harbour Mice® is the world’s first fully human HCAb transgenic mouse with clinical validation. This unique platform offers exceptional versatility for diverse applications using fully human VH single-domain antibodies as a plug-and-play system, including bispecific antibodies, multi-specific antibodies, CAR-T therapies, antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), mRNA-based therapeutics, and more.

By integrating Harbour Mice®, single-B cell screening technology, NonaCarFx™ (a direct CAR-function-based screening platform), Hu-mAtrIx™ (an AI-driven drug discovery platform), Modalities-on-Demand® (a next-generation modalities solution), and end-to-end preclinical drug development services, Nona Biosciences is dedicated to driving the global invention of transformative next-generation drugs. For more information, please visit: www.nonabio.com.

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SOURCE Nona Biosciences

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Moldova eGovernance Agency Launches Banking Use of EVO Digital Identity Credentials Built to European Standards

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CHISINAU, Moldova, Sept. 16, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Digital credentials from EVO, Moldova’s integrated government app, are now accepted by four of the country’s banks: Moldindconbank, FinComBank, EuroCreditBank and Victoriabank, allowing clients to identify themselves through EVO. This marks a broader expansion across the public and private sectors, as Moldova moves to make secure digital identity a standard way to access services nationwide while aligning with Europe’s emerging digital identity ecosystem. Developed in line with the European Digital Identity Wallet framework, EVO is being built to support secure, consent-based and interoperable digital identity transactions, including future cross-border use.

The integration turns the digital documents already available in EVO into reusable credentials for everyday interactions with private-sector services. Identity is confirmed by scanning a QR code and choosing to share the information the bank requests. The verified data is transferred digitally, eliminating the need to present or photocopy a physical identity document and reducing manual data entry.

The eGovernance Agency opened EVO integration to public and private organizations on April 1, 2026. Since then, the ecosystem has expanded beyond the first banking integrations, with 30 relying parties at different stages of connection, including one of Moldova’s largest telecommunications operators and the National Bank of Moldova. At least 20 organizations are expected to be operationally integrated by the end of 2026.

“Digital credentials become valuable when people can actually use them in real-life scenarios, and we’re aiming for ubiquity. Banks are among the institutions where trusted identification matters most, so bringing EVO into everyday banking is an important milestone. Our next step is to expand this ecosystem across both the public and private sectors, while ensuring that what we build in Moldova is compatible with the digital identity infrastructure being developed across Europe,” said Nicoleta Colomeeț, Director of the Moldova eGovernance Agency.

From national rollout to European interoperability

Moldova is developing EVO Wallet in line with European Digital Identity Wallet standards, while contributing its experience in digital credentials to their implementation, testing and cross-border interoperability. As a member of the WE BUILD consortium, Moldova works alongside European partners to validate digital identity credentials and help identify and resolve differences between national implementations. EVO has successfully tested its digital ID in the European PID format and its digital driving licence in the ISO mDL format with partners from France, Hungary, Austria and Belgium, while further interoperability testing in Moldova brought together teams from France, the Netherlands, Croatia, Romania and Ukraine.

For Moldova, an EU candidate country, digital identity is part of a broader transition toward European digital infrastructure. Following integration into initiatives such as SEPA and “Roam Like at Home”, the development of an interoperable digital identity wallet extends that process to how citizens identify themselves and securely share verified information.

The Moldova eGovernance Agency leads the development of Moldova’s digital public infrastructure and the transformation of public services. It develops and operates the national digital platforms that let citizens, businesses and public institutions interact securely online. Its work supports Moldova’s European integration and transition to fully digital public services. EVO test certificates and the integration guide are available on the egov4dev public integration page.

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SOURCE Moldova eGovernance Agency

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