R&D Editors

[Image from Adobe Stock] Why you should read this report: Lab automation looks hot, but the usual indicators are quiet: patents are flat, vendors report uneven demand, and standard market metrics barely move. This report shows what those signals miss—where recent AI-drug-discovery capital actually landed, why “Lab Automation Engineer” roles increasingly require Python and APIs…

10x Genomics has launched the next generation of its Chromium Flex assay with plate-based multiplexing and automation compatibility. The company positions the update to address demand for high-throughput single-cell analysis in pharma and large research programs, saying it will “massively scale single cell research.”The new Flex supports up to 384 samples and “up to 100…

Kaman Precision Products announced the KD-2306, a single-channel, multipurpose, noncontact displacement-sensing system. When paired with a supported dual- or single-coil sensor, the unit is intended for static and dynamic measurements in research and development, the company said. The KD-2306 supports dual and single-coil sensors. Its DIN rail-mount interface is designed for integration into OEM equipment…

Waters Corporation has integrated its DESI XS ion source with the benchtop Xevo MRT high-resolution mass spectrometer, expanding ambient mass spectrometry imaging options on the MRT platform. The pairing brings DESI imaging, label-free chemical analysis directly from sample surfaces with minimal preparation, to Waters’ highest-performing benchtop QTof. The update was highlighted around the International Mass…

Thermo Fisher Scientific released Chromeleon 7.4, a unified chromatography and mass spectrometry data system that supports single-quad, triple-quad, and HRAM instruments and adds centralized storage, remote access, audit trails, and e-signatures for GxP/21 CFR Part 11 compliance in biopharma, food safety, and environmental labs, according to a press release. Chromeleon 7.4 is built for networked…

A survey of 250 engineering leaders at U.S. and European manufacturing companies found that 95% believe full AI adoption by design teams is critical or important in the next 12 to 24 months. The poll, commissioned by CoLab, covered leaders in automotive, consumer hardware, heavy machinery, industrial equipment and medical devices at firms with 1,000…

Meissner has launched its RMS (Rotary Impeller Mixing Solutions) portfolio, a line of biocontainer mixing assemblies designed for drop-in compatibility with existing bioprocessing equipment. The product line is designed to provide mixing assemblies compatible with industry-standard tanks and existing drive units, without requiring additional hardware or modifications. RMS assemblies use Meissner’s TepoFlex® polyethylene (PE) multi-layer…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has launched the Talos 12 TEM, a 120 kV transmission electron microscope aimed at life sciences research, pathology and drug development. The microscope targets fields like cell biology, structural biology and nanoparticle characterization. It offers configurations for routine imaging of cells and tissues, advanced scanning transmission electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy,…

In 2025, R&D labs are being shaped by five interlinked trends. First, self-improving labs can dramatically shorten timelines. Second, cross-disciplinary science merges fields like biology, physics, and computing (as seen with DeepMind’s AlphaFold) to address complex questions faster. Third, virtual lab assistants reduce manual tasks. Fourth, lab robotics integrate robotic arms and liquid handlers, boosting…

It’s clear. R&D budgets are tightening in many industries, ranging from automotive to biopharma and universities. In academia, for instance, there is an at least $11 billion federal research funding freeze while some automotive companies and suppliers trimming thousands of R&D positions and broader research investments. Although biopharma R&D efficiency has ticked up, the overall…

A newly launched website for VACUU·LAN Lab Vacuum Systems from BRANDTECH Scientific positions its offerings as an alternative to inefficient and unreliable traditional central vacuum systems. While many labs still rely on large, continuously running pumps piped throughout a facility, a modular, on-demand approach claims to offer dramatic savings in energy, water, and maintenance, as…

Pepperl+Fuchs has introduced the BTC22 and BTC24 industrial box thin clients designed for 24/7 operation in control rooms and laboratories. The BTC24 supports up to four 4K displays, while the BTC22 connects to either two 4K or three full HD displays via USB-C ALT mode. Both models feature 8 GB DDR4 RAM and include a…

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…