At SLAS 2026, three orchestration platforms launched in the same week, multiple instruments shipped with API-first positioning, and two vendors debuted competing target engagement assays head-to-head. The closed-loop lab is now a procurement fight. On February 5, Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI announced that GPT-5 had autonomously designed and iterated a large cell-free protein synthesis campaign…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) completed its roughly $18.8 billion combination with BD’s Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses on Feb. 9, 2026—and promptly watched its stock fall as much as 12% intraday to $335.86, recovering slightly to around $343 by midday. The selloff wasn’t about the deal structure or the standalone Waters results, both of which…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) said Feb. 9, 2026 that it has completed its combination with BD’s Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses, completing a tax-efficient Reverse Morris Trust transaction first announced in July 2025 and widely described as a roughly $17.5B deal. With the close, legacy Waters shareholders own about 60.8% of the combined company (fully…

Richard Tapper, an Associate Research Specialist at Dow who develops and tests fire-retardant wire and cable formulations, accepted the 2025 R&D Technician of the Year award at the R&D 100 Awards gala in Scottsdale, Arizona. Tapper’s work spans household wiring to grid-scale solar infrastructure, where he pushes halogen-free polymer composites through increasingly stringent burn tests.…

In 2018, a supermassive black hole about 665 million light-years away ripped a passing star apart. At the time, it was “the most boring, garden-variety event,” one researcher recalled. Years later, the same object, AT2018hyz, has become an extreme late-time radio source, with its 5–7 GHz flux climbing from about 1.4 mJy to 33.3 mJy…

By all accounts, December 29, 2008 was an unremarkable day at UCLA’s Molecular Sciences Building. Campus was mostly deserted for winter break. A few postdocs were catching up on benchwork. In a fourth-floor chemistry lab, 23-year-old research assistant Sheri Sangji drew tert-butyllithium, a chemical that ignites on contact with air, into a plastic syringe. The…

A collaboration between Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI has produced what may one of the most concrete demonstrations yet of AI-driven autonomous science: a closed-loop system in which OpenAI’s GPT-5 designed, executed, analyzed and iteratively refined 36,000 cell-free protein synthesis experiments over six months, with minimal human intervention. The system reduced the cost of producing superfolder…

Anthropic has dropped a new model. Opus 4.6, which can now ingest roughly 750,000 words of text in a single session and, more importantly,  actually use that context without the performance degradation that has plagued earlier models. Claude Opus 4.6, released February 5, scored 76% on a long-context retrieval benchmark where its predecessor managed just…

Thomas Lograsso, director of the Critical Materials Innovation Hub at Ames National Laboratory, accepted the 2025 R&D Leader of the Year award with a speech that emphasized collaboration and investing in the next generation. “Science thrives on openness and collaboration,” Lograsso said. “We must continue to invest in research, share knowledge freely, and empower the…

At Cisco’s AI Summit yesterday, OpenAI’s VP for AI and Science Kevin Weil made an extraordinary claim: AI could compress scientific progress by roughly 5x. “If we can truly accelerate science, if we can do the next 25 years of science in the next five years instead… we will be sitting there in 2030 with…

Regenity Biosciences is tackling a long-overlooked challenge in orthopedic medicine. In this R&D 100 Award-winning interview, Natsuyo Shishido Lee (Director of R&D) and Chris Harris (Senior Integration Engineer) discuss RejuvaKnee—a purified, intact bovine meniscus implant made entirely of collagen, designed for segmental defects after partial meniscectomy. With no durable standard of care for years, the…

After four years selling to pharma, co-founders Robert DiFazio and Juliana Hilliard are adding a new line of business: their own drugs. In 2006, a drug called TGN 1412 met every preclinical safety requirement. Clean in animal models. Clean in monkeys. Ninety minutes after six human volunteers received their first dose at a London hospital,…

Scientists using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) spotted the farthest galaxy, called MoM-z14, detected to date, NASA announced last week.  The galaxy existed just 280 million years after the Big Bang. In comparison, the Milky Way formed 800 million years after the Big Bang. The scientists published a paper on the galaxy in the…

Silicon Quantum Computing has built what is, in effect, a designer material you can dial like an instrument. Using scanning tunneling microscope lithography, the Sydney-based company patterned a two-dimensional lattice of roughly 15,000 atom-based quantum dots in silicon, arranged on a 100×150 grid. Results published in Nature show controlled simulation of quantum physics across arrays…

Check out our red carpet interview from the R&D 100 Awards below, where Derek Sokolowski, Product Manager Cell Culture at PHC Corp. of North America, shared the team’s excitement about their win and the science behind it. PHC’s winning product, LiCellMo, a live cell metabolic pathway analyzer, has a core focus: giving researchers continuous, non-disruptive…

NASA says its Perseverance rover has completed the first rover drives on another world planned with the help of AI-generated waypoint plans, a demonstration aimed at reducing the time human rover drivers spend mapping routes, as NASA noted. The demonstration involved two drives on the rim of Jezero Crater in December 2025. On Dec. 8,…

NVIDIA and Dassault Systèmes are building an industrial AI platform that combines NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure with Dassault’s virtual twin software. The partnership aims to speed materials discovery and drug development. The companies argue their “industry world models,” grounded in decades of engineering and scientific workflows rather than internet-scale text and video, can help predict real-world…

Visions of multi-planetary civilization accompanied Musk’s 12-year quest that led to the the SpaceX-xAI merge. Six weeks before announcing the SpaceX-xAI merger, Elon Musk sat in his Austin Gigafactory and explained why he’d reversed course on AI. “I finally came to the conclusion I can either be a spectator or a participant but I can’t…

A 33-year-old man survived without his lungs for 48 hours through the use of an external artificial-lung system until he could receive a double lung transplant. The system was designed by Ankit Bharat, a thoracic surgeon at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, and his team. The team published their findings in Med.…

Marktech Optoelectronics has expanded its silicon photodiode portfolio with new large-area detectors targeting optical instrumentation, spectroscopy and analytical measurement applications. The Latham, NY-based company’s new single-element and quadrant silicon photodiode devices are designed to improve signal capture, alignment tolerance, and signal-to-noise ratio in demanding optical systems. Available in multiple package styles and active area sizes,…

Shimadzu Scientific Instruments (SSI) and Georgia Southern University have entered a strategic research and education partnership through SSI’s Shimadzu Partnership for Academics, Research and Quality of Life (SPARQ) program. Representatives from both organizations announced the collaboration following the signing of an official agreement this week. The partnership is intended to expand Georgia Southern’s research capacity,…

New York City–based autonomous material-science discovery firm Radical AI, founded in 2024, aims to accelerate materials R&D with the integration of AI, engineering and materials science in its self-driving lab. Its lab can create and characterize more than 25 alloys in a single day. The company’s AI system screens billions of material compositions to predict…

Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are reportedly in talks to inject as much as $60 billion into OpenAI as part of a potential up to $100 billion funding round, according to The Information. The deal could be among the largest private capital raises ever attempted, valuing OpenAI at up to $830 billion, according to the Wall…

At the 2025 R&D 100 Awards in Scottsdale, Arizona, we caught up with the National Energy Technology Laboratory team behind PLUS-Graphite. The technology converts polyethylene waste into high-performance synthetic graphite for lithium-ion batteries. Dr. Pangjali Mule, Ashra and Shinway represented NETL on the red carpet, where they reflected on what winning the “Oscar of Innovation”…

Waters Corporation and BD have set Feb. 9 as the closing date for their $17.5 billion combination. The merger will unite BD’s Biosciences and Diagnostic Solutions unit with Waters to create a life sciences instrumentation company with roughly $6.5 billion in annual revenue. BD’s board established February 5 as the record date for the tax-free…