Seven out of ten researchers say their work would be impossible without software. More than half write their own code. And among those who do, one in five has had no formal training in software development, according to the UK-based Software Sustainability Institute. This is the gap where silent failures live. “There’s often a great…

Prelude Therapeutics, a clinical-stage precision oncology company, has released preclinical results indicating that its JAK2V617F mutant-selective inhibitors have disease-modifying potential for myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPNs). MPNs are diseases of the bone marrow and blood affecting approximately 200,000 Americans. The disease can progress into acute myeloid leukemia (AML). In most cases, MPN has no cure. Current treatments…

Decades ago, if you wanted to listen to music on the go, you packed a stack of CDs (or tapes), a Walkman, and headphones. You were your own DJ, but only within the limits of what you could carry. The music lived in plastic cases, and if you forgot an album at home, you went…

Picture this: the alarm on a ULT freezer storing valuable samples at low temperatures goes off at 2 a.m. on a Saturday, or maybe the alarm battery is dead entirely. No one is notified of the freezer failure, and the entire inventory is compromised. Alternatively, a digitalized lab avoids this crisis. In this scenario, a…

The Redwood Coast Airport Microgrid (RCAM) in Northern California has integrated parked electric vehicles (EVs) as a buffer for excess solar generation. In a pilot project, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), the Schatz Energy Research Center at Cal Poly Humboldt, Nissan and Fermata Energy demonstrated that bidirectional EV chargers can automatically respond to microgrid frequency…

AI-branded job titles are dominating career conversations. The internet is overflowing with “how to break into AI” posts and courses. Bootcamps market data science certificates as golden tickets. Google Trends shows rising interest in AI job searches. In any event, 2025 has delivered a more complicated story than the hype suggests, one where the AI…

Over the past few decades, the idea of what counts as a lab has expanded from isolated benches and test rigs to globally distributed R&D environments that span cloud data centers, autonomous factories and national research campuses. The Top 100 Labs 2025 report profiles the commercial, institutional and national labs that are rebuilding their R&D…

“When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Maslow’s famous line succinctly captures where many life sciences organizations find themselves with AI today. The hammer, in this case, is generative AI, an astonishingly powerful tool that seems to promise everything from accelerated molecule discovery to automated lab reporting. But as with any new instrument,…

On average, laboratories emit 425 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour of electricity produced, more than half the emissions of a coal plant.  Fume hoods account for a significant part of a lab’s energy consumption. Hoods run continuously, exhausting the air in the fume cupboard and forcing the HVAC system to work harder to replace…

The 2025 R&D 100 Awards Gala was a celebration of the people and teams behind this year’s most impactful innovations. Winning an R&D 100 Award is a significant milestone for researchers and engineers, and the evening reflected the pride, dedication, and creativity that drive scientific progress. We were honored to recognize breakthroughs from individuals and…

When a cryogenic storage failure hit Karolinska Institutet’s Neo building over the 2023 Christmas holidays, it destroyed decades of samples in just five days. An interruption in the automatic liquid nitrogen refill for 16 of 19 cryogenic tanks allowed temperatures to rise beyond safe limits. Karolinska Institutet’s (KI) internal report later quantified the damage: approximately…

Brandtech Scientific has announced a strategic partnership with Copia Scientific to strengthen sales and service for the BRAND Liquid Handling Station (LHS) product line across the United States and Canada. The LHS is a compact benchtop pipetting robot designed for low-to-medium throughput labs, handling volumes from 1–1000 µL with interchangeable single-channel and 8-channel liquid ends.…

AUTOMA+ 2025 brought together pharma and tech leaders in Vösendorf, Austria on November 24–25 to explore the latest developments in digital R&D, lab automation and manufacturing. The Pharmaceutical Automation and Digitalisation Congress highlighted how AI, digital twins, robotics and IoT are moving from pilots toward production use in smart pharma environments. Supported by Merck, ESTEVE,…

The White House announced “a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century,” the Genesis Mission, according to an executive order published on Monday.  The mission will train AI agents to test hypotheses, automate research workflows and accelerate innovation…

A UK research team has unveiled a soft, lead-free piezoelectric material that converts motion into electricity. Its efficiency is comparable to commercial lead-based ceramics, while being easier to process and far less toxic. The hybrid material, based on bismuth iodide, is described in a new paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Researchers…

When Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica as a record-strength Category 5 storm, Amazon activated its Disaster Relief Hub near Atlanta, one of 15 global disaster relief hubs, and flew in 2,500 pounds of solar power and connectivity gear. The November 5 flight marked the first time Amazon has delivered its new disaster relief technology kits outside…

Last month, I explored how Google’s Gemini 3 compresses scientific visualization workflows, generating interactive molecular models in minutes. But more experience with the model has revealed more uneven performance. In any case, visualization is just one piece of the R&D puzzle. The bigger bottleneck may be coordinating the dozens of discrete tasks that comprise a…

When Washington turns research budgets into a political battleground, it sends what one Swiss ecosystem leader calls a “fatal signal” to scientists watching from around the world. Increasingly, that signal is redirecting their attention toward Switzerland, and especially toward the Basel region. “We are hearing more and more from US scientists and companies that they…

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratory won an R&D 100 award for their project “Bleeding Materials and Enclosures,” a tamper-indicating container made of colorful water beads sealed with epoxy, creating an enclosure. Upon contact with oxygen, the beads turn black in an irreversible chemical reaction, indicating that someone tampered with the enclosure. The project was designed…

The push for rapid innovation is putting pressure on research and development teams. However, as the speed of innovation accelerates, R&D timelines are shrinking, creating a gap where reliability testing cannot keep pace with design speed. These unverified technologies stall at manufacturing, creating a bottleneck effect.  Mechanical failures in manufacturing, which 41% of manufacturing companies…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has launched the TSQ Certis triple quadrupole mass spectrometer, a new LC-MS/MS platform aimed at routine and high-throughput labs in biopharma, clinical and translational research, and environmental and food safety testing. The company says the system is designed to improve consistency and reduce downtime in targeted quantitation workflows. A central claim is…

Scientists from The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) have developed a method to turn fruit and beverage waste into a leather-like material and a biocellulose (BC) fiber that can be used for textiles. Saving the environment The team was inspired by the environmental effects of traditional cellulose fibers. Cotton, for example,…

My neighbor, a chemical engineer, once quipped that AI looks cool but is not practical yet after watching an image model completely botch a mockup for a small construction project. Nano Banana Pro at a glance Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image) is Google’s new flagship image generation and editing model, built on the…

The long-delayed September jobs report landed today with a headline that White House officials were eager to amplify. The economy added 119,000 jobs in September, more than double analysts’ expectations of roughly 50,000. Yet unemployment ticked up to 4.4%, the highest since 2021, and earlier months were revised down, with August now showing a loss…

Cellular Tracking Technologies (CTT) engineers have developed a transmitter light enough to track a monarch butterfly from New Jersey, where the company is based, to Mexico, where the butterflies spend the winter.  For decades, the 5% body-mass rule made it nearly impossible to make a tracker light enough for a butterfly. Monarch butterflies weigh about…