Julia Rock-Torcivia

Verily Health, a company focusing on AI for precision health that emerged from Google X and eventually became Google Life Sciences in 2015, has received funding from its partner Nvidia. The company’s flagship product, the Verily Pre Platform, is a precision health platform that turns clinical, genomic and device data into AI-ready datasets. Verily’s current investors include Alphabet, Series X Capital and UCHealth. In…

A team of researchers spent almost eight years collecting observations of a binary star system to build a three-dimensional model which supports the theory that the two stars formed separately and came together later, rather than forming from the same disk, as the researchers’ 2019 paper suggested. Astronomers think at least 90% of massive stars exist in binary or higher-order multiple systems, but…

After 13 years with the same seafloor-mapping system, the research vessel Nautilus from the non-profit Ocean Exploration Trust (OET) is surveying the deep Pacific around Wake Atoll, a U.S. territory located about 3,000 miles east of the Philippines. The ship is now putting a newly installed multibeam sonar system to work at depths of up to 11,000 meters (36,089 feet), approximately 6.8 miles and deep…

Sandia National Laboratories’ Agent Bayes project faces a nine-month test that asks whether AI can help scientists perform Bayesian reasoning, a process that often requires a subject matter expert and a statistician working together. The project is part of the first cohort selected for the Genesis mission, a Trump administration effort to “transform American science and innovation through the power of artificial…

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories will lead COMPASS, a new program with funding from the DOE’s Office of Technology Commercialization that aims to facilitate the launch of startups based on national lab technologies. The program, which is short for Commercialization Pathways for Accelerating Scientific Solutions, has received 8.4 million in funding over three years from the…

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is partnering with Oxylus, a Yale spinout focused on CO2 electrolysis technology, to develop and, potentially, commercialize a reactor that could convert carbon waste to methanol without alkali cations.   LLNL won $2 million from the DOE’s Industrial Technologies Office through the Technology Commercialization Fund with the aim of advancing the technology toward commercial use. The partnership between LLN and Oxylus is a Cooperative Research and Development…

A team of researchers from the U.S. and South Korea have developed a potentially more sustainable way to refine crude oil, reducing the energy needed for the process by 31.6% in process simulations. The team published their findings in Nature. The scientists investigated the use of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) membranes, which are commonly used as a non-selective…

 An international team of researchers developed a method to convert the carbon dioxide emitted from factories into fuel feedstock without cleaning or purifying the gas. Traditionally, carbon capture requires costly, energy-intensive purification steps. A paper published in Science estimates that separating carbon dioxide from coal flue gas and compressing it to 150 bar requires at least 0.11 megawatt-hours per ton, or about 0.4 GJ. The…

The winners in the 2026 R&D 100 Awards Special Recognition categories have been announced by R&D World. The honorees were selected by an esteemed judging panel including over 50 well-respected industry professionals from across the world. These and other winners will be celebrated at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet in Scottsdale, Arizona on November 19th.  2026…

  R&D World has announced the winners of the 2026 R&D 100 Professional Awards. The list of 2026 winners follows, along with highlights from their nomination letters. These winners will be formally awarded at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet at the Hyatt Scottsdale, AZ on November 19, 2025. R&D Leader of the Year Kumar Sanketh, R&D…

The Human-Occupied Vehicle (HOV) Alvin is returning to the ocean, now with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that could enable scientists to explore deep-sea trenches.   The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) announced that the U.S. Navy’s Director of Submarine Programs (DSP) has certified the human-occupied submersible Alvin to return to service after its overhaul and testing program.   Alvin is owned by…

Researchers at Binghamton University are using computer vision and machine-learning to detect landmines from aerial images. Their results reveal the importance of out-of-sample (OOS) testing, which evaluates a model on independently collected images beyond the dataset used to train and tune it.  “It’s easy to get numbers in the 80 or 90 percent range if you’re not doing out-of-sample testing,” said…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) rescinded a rule that prohibited the use of “criteria or methods of administration which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color or national origin.”  In the rule change, the NSF removed the words “or effect” from a rule that prohibited aid recipients from making selections of sites or locations of facilities “with…

ChemGraph, an open-source AI framework from scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, lets scientists without computational chemistry expertise run quantum chemistry simulations through natural language prompts. Its creators also made a model-by-model reliability leaderboard that ranks models based on various criteria and tasks.  In a paper published early this year, the team evaluated ChemGraph across 13 benchmark experiments involving six integrated tools, organized into three categories: molecule names,…

NASA’s Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), which launched in 2016, is deorbiting on New Year’s Day. The technology will live on, commercialized by Muon Space, a Silicon Valley startup that grew out of a Stanford class project.   The satellites lack propulsion systems, so they have been steadily losing altitude since launch.  They would naturally deorbit sometime next year, burning up on reentry, but NASA decided…

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…

Researchers from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) developed a generative agentic AI that can translate experimental goals into instructions for a laboratory robot. Their paper was published in Scientific Reports.   Gihan Panapitiya, a data scientist at PNNL and the lead author of the paper, said the researchers had plans to extend AutoLabs to literature review, persistent memory and other autonomous lab equipment besides the automated lab workstation Big Kahuna…

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method to upcycle cathodes from used lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries into lithium manganese iron phosphate (LMFP), a material that stores more energy and could offer a more valuable second life for batteries used in electric vehicles and grid storage. The findings were published in Joule.  …

Establishing causal relationships in plant-microbe studies can be exceptionally difficult, as it requires juggling sterility, standardization and manual labor. A single contaminant or inconsistent measurement can render weeks of work unusable. For example, one study on the effects of plant genotype and soil microbiome on growth in Lotus japonicus found that 15% of variability in shoot length was due to variability in the…

Disturbances on Earth, from thunderstorms to earthquakes, send ripples into the upper atmosphere, disturbing the region that low-Earth-orbit satellites fly through and that GPS and communications signals must cross.  “Think of waves as throwing a pebble into a body of water, and you see those waves propagate out in a circle. That’s what happens in…

At least 11 states have enacted bans on expanded polystyrene (EPS), which is commonly used in packing peanuts and food packaging, due to environmental harm. The food packaging industry is now looking for compliant alternatives. However, these tend to be more expensive than conventional polystyrene.   Researchers have created a sustainable alternative to polystyrene using sawdust…

When researchers Marc Hillmyer and Christopher Ellison created their compostable plastic, they focused on accelerating PLA’s degradation without sacrificing other properties such as strength and shelf life.  In a paper published in ACS Central Science, the researchers describe polylactide (PLA) blends that reach 90% biodegradation in 11 days under composting conditions and hold up on…

One year after nearly 500 National Institutes of Health (NIH) employees signed a letter warning that political interference was threatening the agency’s mission, the authors of a new report say the situation has only gotten worse.  “The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026,” the Bethesda Declaration: One Year…

A new study published in Nature found that Antarctic ice loss is remarkably predictable for the next few decades, but varies by glacier. Near-term Antarctic ice loss is linearly predictable through the mid-21st century, but this predictability isn’t a single number. Instead, it’s governed by a physical property called “reservoir timescale” which swings from roughly…

When researchers tuned in to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) public webinars on its new $1.5 billion X-Labs initiative, including one held on June 30, they got a consistent answer to nearly every question about eligibility, IP ownership, milestone design and selection criteria: it depends, and we’ll work it out with you. The NSF X-Labs…