Research & Development World

Even on the largest supercomputers, simulations that explicitly resolve every blood cell can only cover a small volume. On Summit, Oak Ridge National Labs’ supercomputer, cell-resolved simulations topped out at roughly a three-millimeter cube. Exascale machines like Aurora and Frontier have pushed that to about a one-centimeter cube with several billion cells, up from around 500 million, said Amanda Randles of Duke…

By Bill Holt, DO, Vice President, Neuroscience Therapeutic Area, ICON For neurologic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), the scientific hurdle is no longer the primary barrier to success. Increasingly, operational execution—not efficacy—determines whether these therapies reach patients at scale. From multiple sclerosis (MS) to neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) to early Alzheimer’s disease, mAbs have moved from…

Medical device development offers lessons in the gap between a working prototype and a product people can, and will, use. Across R&D, translating a promising discovery into a product requires finding someone who needs it, a practical way to deliver it and a business model that can sustain it. The stakes are especially high in…

Researchers have developed molecular quantum nanosensors (MoQNs) designed to operate in the cytoplasm and nuclei of living cancer cells to map radical-generation processes and thermal dynamics that are linked to cancer-associated cellular physiology.  The sensors use molecular-level uniformity to achieve a threefold enhancement in spectral resolution and superior thermometric specificity. The platform enables absolute temperature…

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is collaborating with Argonne, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as four universities and more than 20 industry partners, on a three-year project to bring agentic AI to nuclear engineering. The principal investigator said the project, called Prometheus, will aim to compress the time to get a nuclear power…

Machines are now solving open math problems and rebuilding complex software on their own. What they do next to the rest of science is an open question. Some of the clearest gains have come in tasks where answers can be checked automatically, using a proof checker or a test suite. Still, frontier AI is moving…

A team of researchers at the Dalian University of Technology in China designed and 3D-printed a spacecraft shield consisting of arrays of hollow, water-filled aluminum eggshells between two plates, reporting that it slowed projectiles by as much as 65% in simulations. Whether the design will hold up against real projectiles remains to be seen. The…

Google and chipmaker Synaptics are previewing a microcontroller designed to bring multimodal AI to devices constrained by power, memory and cost, from wearables to industrial sensors. Synaptics CEO Rahul Patel outlined the chip’s capabilities Oct. 14 at Google Research’s annual Research@ event in Mountain View, ahead of its formal launch Oct. 20. It combines Google’s…

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) calls its new probe “asteroid-landing,” but its engineers don’t expect it to survive hitting 269 Justitia, a 58-km-wide asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter that the United Arab Emirates’ newly announced mission will study. Anton Ivanov, executive director of TII’s Propulsion and Space Research Center, said the…