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In labs developing the novel products like next-generation of batteries and solar cells, researchers are confronting something of a paradox. Advanced materials can unlock dramatic gains in efficiency and performance, but their synthesis frequently depends on energy-heavy processes, hazardous chemicals and limited raw materials. That reality is reshaping how some labs design materials, pushing some…

Those who have worked in drug development know the drill. Turning a promising biomarker into something you can rely on in the clinic is one of the most critical steps, and one of the most failure-prone. A candidate can look brilliant in controlled studies. Then it falls apart when it meets real-world biology, workflows and…

Mercedes-Benz is turning its dashboard assistant into an AI co-pilot. A new MBUX upgrade featuring Google’s Gemini AI moves beyond voice commands to conversational, context-aware trip help. The move starts with the upcoming CLA model and slated for wider rollout. For most drivers, in-car voice assistants have been glorified remote controls: set the temperature, call…

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,…

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…

The intensity of the chip race is written in the patent data. Between early 2024 and late 2025, Qualcomm added nearly 6,000 active patent families to its portfolio, a 25% jump that makes it the S&P 100’s single biggest gainer in absolute terms. Rival Nvidia expanded its own IP moat by 21% over the same period.…

Among the winners of the R&D 100 in 2025 is Abbott’s Liberta RC DBS System, a deep brain stimulation device for treating Parkinson’s disease, the second-most common neurodegenerative disorder in the U.S., with approximately 500,000 Americans suffering from the disease. Some experts estimate that, due to underdiagnosis, the number may be closer to one million.…

Thermo Fisher Scientific has introduced the Orbitrap Exploris EFOX mass detector, a high-resolution accurate-mass (HRAM) system purpose-built for environmental and food safety labs. The company says EFOX is the first Orbitrap platform designed specifically for these routine testing workflows, with full-scan data to support both targeted quantitation and non-targeted screening, plus retrospective analysis as regulations…

On Thursday, Nike announced several new products, including Project Amplify, a powered footwear system for running and walking. The system is “engineered to augment natural lower leg and ankle movement,” according to the press release. It is “in effect, a second set of calf muscles.” The product is still in early testing.  “Our job is…

In the U.S., the biotech sector is navigating a sharp correction. Life sciences lab-space vacancies are above 20% nationally and approach 30% in Greater Boston, with San Diego in the upper-20s. Venture funding has slowed in early 2025. In Greater Boston, there is a record 17 million square feet of available lab space. “The cycles…

As the biotech and biopharma industries strive to develop more precise, personalized and effective therapies for complex diseases, researchers require access to deeper insights from cells, tissues and proteins. Spatial biology, the study of biomolecules and cells within their native tissue microenvironment, along with other advanced imaging techniques, is enabling scientists to better visualize, map…

Waters Corp. announced Monday it will merge with Becton Dickinson’s biosciences and diagnostics unit in a $17.5 billion tax-free deal structured as a Reverse Morris Trust transaction. The move will create a combined testing, life sciences and diagnostics company with a projected $6.5 billion in revenue for 2025. It is also expected to double Waters’…

It turns out rocket science is still rocket science. At 11 p.m. on June 18, 2025, SpaceX engineers initiated what should have been a routine six-engine static fire test — a ground test for an upcoming launch — at Starbase’s Massey test site. Instead, Ship 36 experienced a catastrophic failure during propellant loading, which Elon…

A surgical robot at the Rutgers New Jersey Medical School helped urologists complete “one of the longest single-port, retroperitoneal, buccal graft ureteroplasties on record,” said Evan Kovac, director of urologic oncology and robotic surgery at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) and University Hospital, in a statement.  In 2011, the patient was treated for a…

Pepperl+Fuchs has introduced the BTC22 and BTC24 industrial box thin clients designed for 24/7 operation in control rooms and laboratories. The BTC24 supports up to four 4K displays, while the BTC22 connects to either two 4K or three full HD displays via USB-C ALT mode. Both models feature 8 GB DDR4 RAM and include a…

Groq, the AI accelerator company based in Mountain View, California, has announced that the open-source AI platform Hugging Face has integrated its Language Processing Unit (LPU) inference engine as a native provider on its platform, giving Hugging Face’s over 1 million developers access to inference speeds exceeding 800 tokens per second across ten open weight…

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…

In April, headlines crowed that pups named Romulus and Remus — and Khaleesi — heralded the return of the dire wolf. But at a GW Law webinar, neuroscientist and executive director of The Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy Lori Marino, Ph.D., urged caution, drilling into the fine print, calling them “proxies.” “What is being produced”…

A multi-institutional U.S. Department of Energy effort has delivered the first high-precision calculation of the sigma meson’s mass and lifetime, numbers nuclear theorists have chased for decades but never pinned down with confidence, according to findings published in the journal Physical Review D and highlighted in an announcement. The sigma meson is a subatomic particle…

SpaceX’s Crew-10 mission has swapped gravity for R&D, hauling a toolkit of particle-tracking, protein-clumping and Janus-base nanomaterial experiments the ISS National Lab says could speed up viral diagnostics and build lighter, hotter-running electronics back on Earth. Crew-10 commander Anne McClain, pilot Nichole Ayers, JAXA mission specialist Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos mission specialist Kirill Peskov reached…

Researchers at MIT and the Broad Institute have discovered TIGR-Tas, a novel family of RNA-guided DNA targeting systems found in bacteria and phages. Distinct from CRISPR-Cas, TIGR-Tas offers unique structural features, a much smaller size, and a different targeting mechanism that doesn’t appear to require specific DNA ‘anchors’ (PAM sites). These characteristics could directly address…

Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has announced what it’s calling the “world’s first de-extinction” by successfully creating three dire wolf pups using ancient DNA and cutting-edge genetic engineering. Scientists extracted genetic material from dire wolf fossils dating back 13,000 and 72,000 years, then used CRISPR technology to modify gray wolf DNA, essentially creating hybrid animals…

In a big step towards practical quantum computing applications, a collaboration involving JPMorgan Chase and Quantinuum has successfully used a quantum computer to generate verifiably random numbers. The team produced more than 70,000 certified random bits by tasking Quantinuum’s 56-qubit H2-1 trapped-ion processor with computations designed to be fundamentally challenging for classical machines. They detailed…

In my pursuit to understand why certain themes consistently outperformed others, Google Analytics by itself was falling flat in helping uncover why certain articles soared while others stumbled. So I downloaded decades of data from Google Analytics and WordPress and loaded it into a Jupyter notebook and decided to use semantic clustering, a type of…

Anthropic, a favorite frontier AI lab among many coders and genAI power users has unveiled Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its first “hybrid reasoning” AI model. It is capable of both near-instant answers and in-depth, step-by-step reasoning within a single system. Users can toggle an extended thinking mode where the model self-reflects before answering, considerably improving performance…