AI is proving to be a disruptive force for the hardware sector, which has recently shed tens of thousands of jobs. Intel alone has revealed plans to reduce its workforce by over 20%, equating to some 22,000 workers. But at the same time, many hardware firms are ramping up investments in AI, even as they…

Imagine you’re midway through a time-sensitive lab procedure when a Slack ping hits your laptop: “Hey, do you still have those high-res .tiff files from last quarter’s microscopy experiments? A journal editor says he needs them by the end of the day. Sorry, I didn’t let you know sooner.” You don’t recall where they are.…

Using an “interrogator” device to activate 50 miles of dormant fiber-optic cable, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory seismologists created a network of 8,000 virtual sensors, recording March’s 3.9 magnitude Dublin earthquake with unprecedented detail, achieving 1,000 times the observational density of current seismic networks. “The detail of the seismic wave field was unprecedented,” said Lab seismologist…

First came Apple’s 2024 pact to let Siri tap ChatGPT for answers it can’t find on-device. Now OpenAI is spending $6.5 billion in stock to absorb Jony Ive’s skunkworks, io. Ive, known for his work at Apple, where he led design of products such as iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch, and even Apple’s circular…

Nvidia is actively trying to navigate the current U.S. export controls rather than simply waiting for them to expire. The company is said to be pursuing a Shanghai R&D site, as FT reported, while CEO Jensen Huang has branded Washington’s chip‑export curbs on China a “failure.” Huang argued that the restrictions had not only dampened the…

Drugmakers aren’t the only ones upgrading their data plumbing. While Moderna works with Benchling to build out an R&D data platform, NASA has trained a 3 billion parameter model on 100 million Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) satellite images to pull new signals from 25 years of Earth-observation data. Introducing SatVision-TOA The resulting model, known…

More R&D-heavy organizations in sectors like biopharma are revamping their data plumbing. One such entity is Moderna, which is expanding its collaboration with Benchling to consolidate fragmented laboratory data into a unified, AI-primed platform. This move addresses an  industry gap, as a 2024 Benchling report found that only 14% of large biopharma and a 3%…

Google’s data centers have gained 0.7% more operational capacity thanks to AlphaEvolve, an AI agent that iteratively refines code for optimal performance. This same system also advanced a long-standing geometry challenge by finding a new way to pack 11 identical hexagons. Those are not the only advances. AlphaEvolve also discovered superior algorithms for matrix multiplication…

In a reported first, researchers have successfully used CRISPR gene editing in spiders, inserting the gene for a red fluorescent protein into the major ampullate silk gene of Parasteatoda tepidariorum. The edited orb weaver spun crimson fibers and passed the glow to its young, evidence that spider silk can now be genetically tuned for bespoke…

Twin Cities–based medical-device design firm Kablooe Design will get its first new chief executive in 34 years this summer. Founder Tom KraMer will step aside on August 17, and move into a strategic-account role. His successor, Fred Sklenar, is a 37-year product-development veteran who joined Kablooe after running his own consultancy and teaching design-for-manufacturing courses.…

First came “Quantum Day,” Nvidia’s March 20 showcase at GTC put CEO Jensen Huang side-by-side with quantum players he had dismissed on January 7 at CES. Now, according to The Information and Reuters, Huang is in talks to invest in photonic-qubit upstart PsiQuantum, underscoring potentially changed thinking after quipping at CES that “very useful” quantum machines…

[Last updated on May 18, 2025] Microsoft’s plan to shed about 6,000 jobs—roughly 40% of them engineering roles in Washington state—pushes the 2025 layoff tally for tracked companies past 89,500. The announcement followed reports that Jeff Hulse, a Microsoft vice president, urged his 400‑person team to “become AI prompt engineers” and rely on Copilot for…

Los Angeles is thinking outside of the box in planning for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The idea? Use electric air taxis to address its notorious traffic. L.A.’s mayor, Karen Bass, has even mused about an (almost) car-free Games. The company making the craft, Archer Aviation, hopes to enable 10–20 minute flights between vertiports.…

More than nine out of ten manufacturers (92%) say smart-manufacturing technology will be their chief competitive edge within three years, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations survey of 600 U.S. executives. Nearly 15 years after “Industrie 4.0” promised a literal factory revolution with software and sensing advances reshaping workflows. While the benefits of…

Not all solar flares are created equal. On one end of the spectrum are A-class solar flares, which are near background levels. And then there is the X-class, where an X1 event is 10,000 times more powerful in X-ray output than an A1 event. Early Wednesday, there was an X2.7 flare, the ‘2.7’ indicating it’s…

Hiring headaches are nothing new in STEM, where the pipeline of qualified scientists and engineers is in short supply. Engineering.com’s 2025 Engineering Salary Survey puts hard numbers behind the worries. Nearly 60% of the 591 surveyed engineers have been in the trenches for more than two decades, while newer graduates are relatively rare. In terms…

According to The Environmental Impact of Artificial Intelligence, the AI industry is poised to consume an estimated 85–134 TWh of electricity annually by the year 2027.  That’s a lot of power.  That level of electricity equates to about 15 nuclear power plants, 6,000 wind turbines, or 1.5 billion LED bulbs. See Figure 1 for a…

Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), in collaboration with TUMint.Energy Research, have set a new benchmark for solid-state battery electrolytes, introducing a lithium-antimony-scandium compound that shuttles lithium ions at 42 mS/cm. The breakthrough is detailed in a research article published April 28, 2025, in Advanced Energy Materials and a news announcement. In the…

GenAI may represent one of the biggest R&D pushes in recent memory. Gartner forecasts that worldwide spending on generative AI is set to soar to $644 billion in 2025, but the road to broadly useful, and commercially reliable, AI is getting twisty. 1. Meta: Behemoth on ice Meta has slipped the debut of its next-gen large…

Laura McGill, two weeks into her tenure as Sandia National Laboratories director, addressed the organization’s New Mexico staff on May 14. She stated that the lab would double down on its core role as the nation’s nuclear-weapons system integrator while also scaling up digital-engineering and AI projects. She announced a projection of up to $5…

GreyB on Wednesday rolled out Slate, an AI search tool that promises to collapse the grunt work of patent and literature hunts into a single query. The firm says early pilots cut document-finding time “from hours to minutes.” Slate’s index reaches across more than 160 million patents filed in 100-plus jurisdictions and roughly 264 million…

Low-quality, poorly curated, and siloed scientific data costs advanced economies billions of dollars each year by draining researcher productivity, duplicating experiments, and slowing innovation. A report commissioned by the European Commission estimated that failing to adopt FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) data principles costs Europe’s economy at least €10.2 billion annually owing to wasted researcher…

The R&D World Index (RDWI) slid this week even as several companies rolled out big new R&D projects. For the week ending May 9, 2025, the index closed at 3,773.11, down 3.85% (–151.24 points). Sixteen of the 25 members fell. Eli Lilly & Co. was the biggest laggard (–10.81%) despite breaking ground on a huge…

Wetzlar, Germany–based Leica Microsystems has introduced a new line of upright microscopes known as Visoria B, Visoria M, and Visoria P built for labs where a “quick look” often turns into an hour at the bench. By electronically capturing every objective change and reducing the force needed to move the stage or adjust focus, the…

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…