R&D Editors

ZEISS Research Microscopy Solutions and Alpenglow Biosciences have announced a multi-phase partnership to build an inverted light-sheet microscope and accompanying bioinformatics pipeline aimed at clinical pathology. The companies say the joint system will digitize entire tissue samples without a microtome, generate 3D images and feed them into a GPU-accelerated analytics engine. In press materials, ZEISS…

A recent paper published in Nature Materials  notes that warm rolling, the same core process that turns aluminum ingots into beverage-can stock, can strengthen silver and copper chalcogenides. It notes, for instance, that “narrow-gap semiconductor Ag2Se can be plastically manufactured by warm metalworking.” Yield and tensile strengths climb significantly in Ag₂Se, Cu₂Se, AgCuSe and AgCuS…

Cryogenic electron microscopy at resolutions of 2.9 to 3.1 Å has revealed that three bacterial non-coding RNAs can fold into large, symmetric multistrand assemblies without any protein assistance, researchers report in an article preview in Nature. Using cryogenic electron microscopy at resolutions of 2.9 Å (OLE), 3.1 Å (ROOL), and 3.0 Å (GOLLD), the researchers…

Scientists have engineered molecular catalysts that harvest readily available blue LED light (405 nm) to stitch together four‑membered ring structures, such as β‑lactams, the core of many antibiotics, and cyclobutanes, common components in agrochemicals, while working openly in air. One of the photoenzymes (VEnT1.3) achieved turnover numbers exceeding 1,300, while another (SpEnT1.3) demonstrated over 300 turnovers,…

UC Berkeley researchers have published the full blueprints for “Berkeley Humanoid Lite,” a mid-scale robot that undercuts six-figure commercial humanoids by nearly two orders of magnitude. The team says anyone with a desktop 3D printer and a parts budget below $5,000 can build the 0.8-meter-tall biped (about 2 feet 7.5 inches tall). Commercial humanoids such…

Philips sifted 146 million patent filings to map future medical-device options. Food-tech startup Sevvy ran a similar exercise to compare cooking technologies. Both projects relied on GetFocus, a Rotterdam-based firm that applies an MIT-derived algorithm to rank how quickly technologies improve. In the Philips project, the goal was to determine the optimal investment timing for…

A Florida Atlantic University team infused red oak with ferrihydrite nanoparticles, boosting cell-wall strength without adding bulk or sacrificing flexibility. The one-pot, low-cost process nudged wood toward construction-grade strength, reportedly with only a “small amount of extra weight,” according to mechanical tests spanning AFM to full-beam bending. Working with colleagues at the University of Miami…

A three-person team at Skoltech built a lightweight neural network, 10 layers and about 300 learnable parameters, that can take over the tedious Winslow-equation routine engineers rely on to wrap a square grid around oddly shaped domains. After roughly 5,000 training cycles, the model morphs a flat mesh into a curved one while keeping the…

Google chief Sundar Pichai told a federal judge Wednesday that a proposal to make the company share its search index and query data with rivals would amount to “a de facto divestiture” of its core intellectual property and cripple future research spending, according to a Reuters report. The same data trove that let Google dominate…

Caltech researchers and collaborators have completed the first lab tests of quantum sensors designed for tomorrow’s high-energy particle colliders, the university announced April 24. The sensors could uncover data on high-energy particles that are smashed together in particle accelerators to produce novel particles unpredicted by the standard model of physics. The work, under the leadership…

The Quantum Economic Development Consortium has released a 28-page report, “Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence Use Cases,” setting out why the two technologies should be developed in tandem and what Washington, universities, and industry can do to speed that convergence. The document distills a Seattle workshop held October 29, 2024, that pulled in quantum engineers,…

Meta and Groq used the Llamacon stage to debut a joint offering that pipes Meta’s first-party Llama API through Groq’s Language Processing Units (LPUs), promising production-grade speed at a fraction of conventional inference costs. What developers get The partners bill the service as “no-tradeoff” inference: fast responses, predictable low latency and reliable scaling, all at…

A multi-institutional U.S. Department of Energy effort has delivered the first high-precision calculation of the sigma meson’s mass and lifetime, numbers nuclear theorists have chased for decades but never pinned down with confidence, according to findings published in the journal Physical Review D and highlighted in an announcement. The sigma meson is a subatomic particle…

Stellantis N.V. and Boston-based Factorial Energy have advanced their joint solid-state battery program with the internal validation of a 77-amp-hour, automotive-sized pouch cell built on Factorial’s FEST (“Factorial Electrolyte System Technology”) platform. The milestone clears an early technical hurdle for the partners as they work toward commercial deployment in future Stellantis electric vehicles. The newly…

Developed at MIT and detailed in the journal Nature, an ultrathin device for far-infrared sensing registers tiny changes in heat, reads the complete far-infrared spectrum, and needs no active cooling. All of those qualities are packaged in a film just 10 nanometers thick. The device’s compactness supports lightweight, portable formats such as eyeglasses. Corresponding authors…

Picture a semi-autonomous device scarcely thicker than a spaghetti noodle, crawling through living brain tissue at the pace of 3 mm per minute and guided by artificial intelligence. That is the vision behind Robeauté SA’s neurosurgical microrobot, a tethered, internally propelled system designed to reduce the trauma, complexity and cost of accessing deep-seated brain lesions.…

Caltech engineers have taken their flexible “lab-on-skin” bandage out of the animal lab and onto the wards, logging round-the-clock data from 20 human patients with stubborn wounds that resist healing. In the first peer-reviewed report of the device’s performance in people, the researchers show that the stamp-sized patch can scoop up fresh fluid from chronic…

The discovery of lariocidin could be the first completely new class of antibiotics in nearly 30 years. Unearthed from soil collected in a Canadian lab technician’s garden, this lasso-shaped peptide hits drug-resistant Gram-negatives by locking onto a ribosomal site no marketed drug touches, wiping out pan-resistant pathogens while sparing mammalian cells. A paper in Nature…

NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP) is in the process of undergoing critical environmental testing at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. After its arrival on March 18, 2025, IMAP was moved into the X-ray and Cryogenic Facility (XRCF) on March 19, where it began a 28-day thermal vacuum test to simulate…

Matteo Paz, a Pasadena High School senior whose interest in astronomy was sparked by Caltech public lectures, used AI to develop a computational model while participating in Caltech’s Summer Research Connection outreach program. Under the mentorship of IPAC astronomer Davy Kirkpatrick, Paz analyzed over a decade’s worth of NASA’s NEOWISE infrared survey data. While the…

A major question in cosmology is how the first galaxies released enough high-energy radiation to ionize the neutral universe after the Big Bang. Now, advanced analysis of X-ray data from the starburst galaxy Haro 11 sheds light on how galaxies contribute to cosmic reionization. Using principal component analysis (PCA) on observations from Chandra and XMM-Newton,…

Navigating chemical libraries containing tens of billions of potential drug molecules presents a significant challenge for drug hunters. Seeking to streamline this process, Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a clinical-stage TechBio company, and Enamine, an integrated discovery Contract Research Organisation (CRO), have announced a new collaboration. The partnership hinges on applying machine learning predictions from its Recursion…

Imagine the process that turns liquid coffee into instant granules being used to power the future of energy storage. Researchers at the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) and the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) have done just that, adapting spray drying, a technique familiar from the food industry, to create high-capacity battery electrodes. This…

Imagine you’re tasked with building a robot—an autonomous system designed for industrial precision. You’ve spent months just trying to find the requisite talent. Your mechanical engineering team was relatively easy to assemble, but when it comes to the specialized skill sets needed—reinforcement learning (RL), AI integration, and advanced robotic perception—you’re hitting a wall. Experts command…

Something profound is stirring in the world’s research labs. Timelines for discovery are collapsing, complex problems are yielding to new approaches, and the very tools researchers use are beginning to design themselves. AI and advanced automation are no longer just aids; they are gradually finding widespread use among many scientists. Such advances are enabling advances…