Energy

For the first time since the agency was created in 2000, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has furloughed about 1,400 federal employees, roughly 80% of its workforce, because of the October shutdown. About 375 employees remain on duty for essential functions. That’s a break with the 35-day 2018–2019 shutdown, when NNSA avoided furloughs. Sen.…

Electric vehicles have been rising in popularity in recent years, likely owing to lower fuel costs and emissions than gasoline vehicles. However, one major barrier to widespread adoption remains. While some people have the freedom, space and financial ability to install a charging station at their home, many do not. Additionally, the lack of publicly…

As distributed energy resources proliferate across the electric grid, the cyber-attack surface for cyber threats expands, and those digital intrusions can trigger consequences in the real world. Legacy monitoring tools still operate in silos, with one platform watching network traffic and another tracking voltage and frequency, leaving utilities blind to events that straddle both domains.…

Last updated: October 3, 2025 The heaviest R&D job losses this year cluster in hardware and semiconductors, with sizeable single events at Dell, Microsoft and Intel’s Oregon sites, while biopharma cuts are smaller per event but frequent as firms triage pipelines. Federal labs have also reduced staff amid budget uncertainty, including the CDC, NIH and…

Oak Ridge National Laboratory was named on 20 of the 2025 R&D 100 Awards, 17 as lead developer and three as co-developer.  The showing sets a new record for the lab, accounting for about one-fifth of all winners. Since the 1980s, ORNL has won more than 260 R&D 100 Awards Our sister publication engineering.com recently…

As GPS jamming and spoofing affect over 1,500 commercial flights daily, about five times early-2024 levels, the aviation industry is racing to deploy quantum-powered backup systems that don’t rely on vulnerable satellite signals. New research from the University of Chicago and the Chicago Quantum Exchange reveals that quantum navigation prototypes are already being tested by…

griDNA, an R&D 100 (2025) finalist from Sandia National Laboratories, is an autoencoder-based system that fuses 60-samples-per-second grid measurements (frequency, voltage, current) with intermittent network telemetry to identify cyber, physical, and blended anomalies on the power grid. The team has run the model on low-cost single-board computers and on existing security devices and is field-testing…

The official 2025 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World. This worldwide science and innovation competition, now in its 63rd year, received entries from organizations around the world. This year’s judging panel included industry professionals from across the globe who evaluated breakthrough innovations in technology and science. The Winners are listed below by…

Thanks to the continued AI boom, data centers are popping up around the U.S., but some states are favored more than others. While Virginia has the most data centers, over 300, Arizona is now a magnet for new facilities, given its low operating costs and plentiful space.  There are, of course, additional logistical hurdles involved…

R&D World has announced the winners of the 2025 R&D 100 Professional Awards. The honorees were selected by a panel of 54 prestigious industry experts from around the globe. The list of 2025 winners follows, along with highlights from their nomination letters. These winners will be formally awarded at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet at…

A total of 158 Finalists for the 2025 R&D 100 Awards have been announced by R&D World. Now in its 63rd year, this renowned global science and innovation competition drew entries from 13 countries/regions. This year’s esteemed judging panel featured 54 respected industry professionals from across the globe. The Finalists are listed below by category,…

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have demonstrated a circuit breaker that could finally make medium-voltage DC power distribution economically viable for data centers and manufacturing facilities, the lab announced in a press release. By using 1950s-era thyristors instead of modern semiconductors, the team achieved sub-50-microsecond interruption times at a fraction of the cost. The…

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has deployed what it bills as the Multi‑Agent Design Assistant (MADA) to speed inertial confinement fusion (ICF) target design. The system couples large language models with LLNL’s 3D multiphysics code, MARBL. The goal? Automating the generation of simulation decks. Researchers run the agent framework on the El Capitan supercomputer, among…

A Los Alamos National Laboratory team has advanced inertial-confinement fusion (ICF), a method that uses lasers to compress fuel pellets and trigger nuclear fusion, mimicking the sun’s energy production. The researchers achieved ignition with a novel windowed hohlraum, a cavity (from the German “Hohlraum,” meaning “hollow space” or “empty room”) dubbed THOR (Thinned Hohlraum Optimization…

This week in R&D: the first quantum computer in space is now orbiting the Earth; a potential new treatment for Alzheimer’s, thanks to cancer drugs; a startup is breaking ground on their first fusion power plant, they say they are on track to deliver fusion energy by 2030; Google DeepMind announced their AI Earth mapping…

Researchers from the Energy & Environment Materials Research Division of the Korea Institute of Materials Science (KIMS) developed a highly durable flexible perovskite solar cell that remains stable even under high humidity conditions. This could enable the production of perovskite solar cells in ambient air, which would reduce manufacturing costs. They published their findings in…

Researchers from Empa’s Functional Polymers laboratory have developed a new electrode based on graphene, which could help supercapacitors have higher energy densities.  Like batteries, supercapacitors store electrical energy. While supercapacitors absorb and release energy faster than a battery, they cannot hold as much electricity. The researchers set out to improve this fault by creating a…

Scientists from the University of Texas at El Paso demonstrated a new technique to improve the yield of biofuel from microalgae. Their study in ACS Applied Bio Materials centers on the microalga Chlorella vulgaris, which is commonly found in freshwater and can be used to produce biofuels.  The researchers demonstrated that doses of zinc oxide…

Google’s recent sustainability report reveals that the company has more than doubled its electricity use in the past four years. In 2024, Google’s data centers used 30.8 million megawatt-hours of electricity, up from 14.4 million megawatt-hours in 2020. In 2024, data centers accounted for 95.8% of the entire company’s electricity use.  While Google reported that…

Researchers at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) have developed a method to convert plastic waste into hydrogen, which can be used for clean energy. They published their findings in Engineering.  Using a photocatalyst to oxidize plastic  The researchers engineered a porous tungsten oxide (WO3) photoanode that interacts with polystyrene (PS) plastic. PS…

The NJ HAX Plasma Forge, a new partnership between the New Jersey Economic Development Authority (NJEDA), SOSV venture capital firm and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), will help launch and grow startups focused on plasma technology. The NJ HAX Plasma Forge will be located near the PPPL in Princeton, NJ and will feature approximately…

Two Harry S. Truman Fellows are undertaking research to translate advanced quantum optical principles from laboratory concepts into scalable, manufacturable devices. Truman Fellow Sam Peana focuses on quantum photonics research. As a doctoral student, he contributed to a team thaat identified a novel single-photon emitter found in silicon nitride-oxide materials. He subsequently developed techniques for…

Sandia National Laboratories is thawing out what reportedly amounts to the world’s largest molten-salt test facility after a seven-year freeze, armed with a $2.5 million DOE grant that will let companies stress-test pumps, valves and heat-exchangers at 600°C. Sandia intends to complete the restart next year. Once up and running, the revived 7,000-gal Molten Salt…

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…

The AI race hinges not just on algorithms and silicon, but increasingly on raw power. The International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that global electricity consumption by data centers will more than double by 2030, with AI-specific data centers alone expected to quadruple in consumption. By then, the energy used for AI processing in the U.S.…