Julia Rock-Torcivia

The Department of Energy (DOE) has announced 12 new Phase II and six Phase I projects for the Genesis Mission. These cap the first-year cohort at 297 projects, the department said in a press release. President Trump launched the Genesis Mission in November 2025, and DOE runs it. The plan connects DOE’s supercomputers, scientific data…

A soft contact lens can now measure serotonin, a neurotransmitter involved in mood regulation and stress, in tears. Researchers at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation (TIBI) in Los Angeles described the reusable lens Sept. 16 in Science Translational Medicine. Such lenses could detect chronic stress, which raises the risk of conditions from heart disease…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) said Oct. 8 they will collaborate on metascience, the use of scientific methods to study how research is funded and conducted. The agencies said they will explore cooperation, including on data analysis and coordinated experiments. The UKRI has already trialed new ways of reviewing…

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…

The United Arab Emirate’s Technology Innovation Institute (TII) calls its new probe “asteroid-landing,” but its engineers don’t expect it to survive hitting the asteroid 269 Justitia, a 58-kilometer-wide rock between Mars and Jupiter that is among the reddest in the main belt and may have formed near or beyond Neptune. Anton Ivanov, executive director of…

On Sept. 28, SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft reached orbit for the first time during its 14th test flight, after 13 earlier flights on deliberately suborbital trajectories, and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Flight 14 demonstrated satellite delivery and initial communications. The computing payloads, sustained heat rejection, economics and operation at the proposed constellation’s scale remain to…

German biophysicists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel and Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in optogenetics, a technique to control neurons with light, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced today. Thomas Perlmann, the Nobel Assembly’s secretary-general, pointed to vision restoration as an…

Hyperscalers, the largest cloud computing companies, are borrowing at record levels to build data centers. AI-related debt issuance reached nearly $500 billion in 2026 by early August, according to Goldman Sachs. That buildout is aimed at commercial customers and the companies’ own AI products, and it has done little so far to ease the compute…

The International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory launched its Orbital Edge Accelerator last year, funding six startups with its first cohort. This year, the lab split the program into two tracks, one focused on dual-use applications and one for in-space manufacturing and space biology. The ISS National Laboratory selected a total of eight early-stage startups…

When there’s a fire, smoke detectors beep when enough smoke fills the air to scatter a light beam within the device enough that it hits a light detector. This ‘dumb’ model works well to detect house fires. Detecting radiation is different. Detection thresholds, the signal level a pulse must exceed for a detector to count…

The global pecking order of countries spending the most on research was once relatively stable. In the previous order, the U.S. spent the most, China the second and countries like Germany, Japan and South Korea rounded out the next tier. But the order is shifting. Now, China is on top based on purchasing power parity…

Lilly’s LillyPod, an AI supercomputer, went live on February 25. Roche deployed its NVIDIA AI factory on March 16 and BMS has been running its AI factory for almost three years, with NVIDIA hardware powering all three buildouts. NVIDIA uses the term “AI factory” to describe a GPU cluster built to train and run AI models.…

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…

The top two innovation hubs in the world are in Asia, according to a recent report from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). Leading the list of the top 100 innovation clusters is the greater Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou area, with Huawei being the commercial anchor there. In the second slot is Tokyo-Yokohama, which is home to…

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…

Researchers led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have combined two X-ray techniques to watch how a molecule’s electrons and its surrounding water reorganize together during a reaction that underpins photosynthesis and cellular metabolism in what the team says is the first study to combine these techniques to capture that interplay in a single experiment. They published their work in Nature…

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…