An analysis of 45 years of R&D 100 Awards reveals a clear leader: Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), with more than two hundred winning products. National labs dominate the top ranks, demonstrating the staying power of consistent government investment in R&D. All of the top 10 organizations since 2010 are federally-backed entities. ORNL Frequently featured…

AI is changing the dynamics of industrial work. But while many people, whether in the industrial sector or outside of it, fear that one of the main thrusts of AI will be job replacement, that’s not the view of Honeywell executive Jason Urso. With a wave of retirements looming in industrial sectors, Urso believes the…

It’s no wonder that a team of scientists at General Atomics won the “Team of the Year” R&D 100 Professional Award for their development of the 4Pi System. This metrology tool played a pivotal role in the historic achievement of fusion ignition at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in December 2022. Scientists demonstrated for the…

At its Honeywell Users Group event in Dallas, Honeywell and Chevron revealed a strategic alliance that would use AI to streamline operator decision-making in refining processes, aiming to enhance both efficiency and safety. “The focus of the partnership is to use AI to build real, impactful solutions that will set new standards for operational efficiency,”…

In this week in AI research, OpenAI’s latest models impress in some STEM related tasks, especially in coding. Math is another strong point. In addition, Salesforce is making good on its promise to base its company on AI “agents” – autonomous entities handling customer service and scheduling. CEO Marc Benioff posits them as a scalable alternative…

The web is facing a deluge of AI-generated content, with an explosive 8,362% surge from November 2022 to March 2024, according to a study by Copyleaks. From Q1 2023 to Q1 2024, the volume of AI-detected content jumped 2,848% based on an analysis of more than a million web pages per period using data from…

For decades, structural biologists have sought to map the structures of proteins and other macromolecules within cells. Cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), whose early development traces back to the 1970s, emerged as a promising technique for visualizing cells in their natural, hydrated state. But the technology’s initial inability to produce sharp images was a stumbling block in…

After nearly a year of rumors surrounding OpenAI’s “Q*” (later “Strawberry“) project and its potential for advanced reasoning, the company has finally unveiled its new “o1” AI models that mirror humans’ ability to think before speaking. These models allocate more processing power to reasoning before generating output, significantly improving accuracy on complex tasks across science,…

Reviews are in for a beta version of Apple’s AI, following its iPhone 16 announcement. And experts are less than impressed. Vox called the tech “magically mediocre” after testing a developer beta. While AI Supremacy described Apple Intelligence as “late, unfinished & clumsy.” Critics point out that many of the touted AI features are not…

After a wave of media attention about rumored OpenAI models codenamed Strawberry and Orion, OpenAI has announced the launch of OpenAI o1, a new series of AI models designed to handle complex problems requiring advanced reasoning. According to an announcement from the company, the model family represents a significant leap forward from previous models in…

OpenAI is gearing up to launch its potentially reasoning-based and math-capable AI model codenamed “Strawberry,” according to a report from The Information. The release, which could come within the next two weeks, marks a significant step in OpenAI’s quest to develop more advanced AI systems. The initial release may be limited to a small group…

At Lubrizol, the quest for better skincare has taken a decidedly high-tech turn, culminating in the recent opening of a new Beauty Research Institute in Shanghai. This facility will serve as a global hub for in-vivo beauty testing. It will also aid the company in developing next-generation ingredients designed to cater to the specific needs…

What if the combination of stem cell research, bioengineering and biocomputing could help patients with neurological damage? Researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the University of Southern California (USC) are embarking on a research initiative to explore that very possibility. With a $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Emerging Frontiers…

[Updated on September 16, 2024 with new details from FactCheck.org] The current Biden-Harris administration and Project 2025, a potential blueprint for a second Trump term, offer starkly different visions for the future of American science. Conversely, Project 2025—a conservative policy roadmap from a think tank featuring input from multiple former government officials — proposes a…

The 2011 Fukushima disaster sent shockwaves through the nuclear industry, sparking a global quest for safer reactor designs. At Argonne National Laboratory, scientists are tackling this challenge head-on by exploring the extreme behavior of nuclear fuels at unimaginable temperatures. Researchers at Argonne successfully measured and analyzed the structure of molten plutonium oxide (PuO2) at temperatures…

From accelerating drug discovery to automating patent searches, AI is popping up in a growing number of R&D contexts. Two of the top stories this week had a direct NVIDIA connection — first, Elon Musk’s announced what he terms the world’s largest GPU cluster, featuring 100,000 of its H100 GPUs, designed to power his new…

For millions suffering from chronic pain, relief often comes with a host of complications. But a new generation of spinal cord stimulators aims to change that. The medical device company BackStop Neural has won a two-year, $485k Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to support the…

Gone are the days when scientific progress was confined to individual disciplines, like swimmers rigidly adhering to their designated lanes in a pool. Today, breakthroughs increasingly occur at the intersection of fields, as researchers break free from these traditional boundaries and collaborate across disciplines to tackle complex challenges—from developing personalized cancer treatments based on genomic…

Parallel Bio’s head of technology shares a vision for faster, cheaper, and better biological research with human organoids. Ari Gesher, Parallel Bio’s new head of technology, may be new to biotech, but that’s not stopping him from thinking big about disrupting the status quo in biological research. The biotech startup is betting on automation and…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has often highlighted the transformative impact of AI, stating that it’s a “more profound” tool than the human discoveries of fire or electricity. Shweta Maniar, Global Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Google, echoed this sentiment in a recent interview. AI’s applications in the life sciences are broad, and the…

Apple, Dell, Intel… the tech layoff headlines keep coming. But don’t think for a second it’s just Silicon Valley feeling the pinch. A closer look reveals a surge in job cuts across multiple R&D-heavy industries. Tesla cut 14,000 workers in April 2024 (10% of its workforce). Other transportation companies making cuts include electric vehicle (EV)…

While the mathematical capabilities of large language models such as ChatGPT are steadily improving, math is clearly not their forté. Not only is it extremely computationally efficient to ask such a model a math question, it isn’t all that hard to find word problems that trip up even the latest LLMs — like ‘how many…

“Facebook’s parent Meta AI has unveiled Sapiens, a family of high-performance vision models designed to excel in ‘in-the-wild’ environments, overcoming the limitations of traditional models often confined to controlled studio settings. The family of models focuses on ‘four fundamental human-centric vision tasks,’ as the arXiv paper on the tech noted. Those include 2D pose estimation,…

Move over, neural networks. Scientists at the University of Reading have taught a simple hydrogel to play the 1970s game Pong, which, for those unfamiliar, is something like an uber-simple game of table tennis (pingpong). The discovery, published in Cell Reports Physical Science, could pave the way to a new era of ‘smart’ materials that…

 A more deadly strain of mpox is spreading across Africa, with more than 17,000 suspected cases and a death toll already surpassing last year’s total. With the more severe Clade I variant driving the uptick, mpox continues to pose a significant threat to global health with the World Health Organization (WHO) classifying it as…