Entrepreneurs, researchers and program participants gathered on Wednesday, May 13, 2026 for the Department of Energy’s Lab-Embedded Entrepreneurship Program (LEEP) Demo Day, hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Innovation Crossroads at Covenant Health Park in Knoxville. 

A University of Oklahoma economist will collaborate with researchers in Peru to explore how trade-related industries affect environmental systems, including water resources, soil quality and biodiversity, through an interdisciplinary research partnership linking economics and sustainability.

The Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering North America has elected Sana Elyas as president of the 2026-2027 North America Executive Cabinet. Her term will officially begin on July 1, 2026.

Anyone seeking to purchase healthy products at the supermarket needs clear guidance. Nutritional labelling schemes, such as Nutri-Score labels, are designed to help with that. The Nutri-Score front-of-pack label shows a five-colour system from favourable nutritional composition in green (A) through to unfavourable in red (E). The scheme is optional on products across the EU but has been adopted by companies in several countries, for instance, Germany and the Netherlands. Some supermarkets also print a grey version on the price tag, but the colourful version on the shelf also attracts more attention here. Researchers at Göttingen University – in collaboration with Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, the German Institute of Food Technology and Giessen University – studied consumers’ visual attention on these label formats. Their research showed colourful labelling catches the eye more frequently and for longer than monochrome. Particularly frequent and prolonged glances at the dark green A or the yellow C were usually accompanied by choosing this particular product. The red E, on the other hand, did not have the desired warning effect: even when this unfavourable rating was viewed frequently, the products still ended up in shopping baskets. The study was published in the journal Food Quality and Preference.

THE STUDY IN A NUTSHELL

Researchers created a new model combining the effects of cascading failures in supply chain networks and the interbank market, where banks lend money to each other.

Simulations across 1,001 scenarios modelled on the Covid-19 shock show that supply chain contagion amplifies interbank contagion by 70%.

The systemic financial risk posed by individual firms is amplified by 12–28% through interbank contagion.

Extreme loss scenarios become substantially more likely in the presence of supply chain contagion.

The model gives regulators and banks a stronger basis for assessing systemic financial risk and designing targeted intervention measures in response to pandemics, trade wars, or naval blockades.

Remote sensing quantifies the destruction of both infrastructure and economic activity  from the war in Gaza. Satellite-based data reveals that more than three quarters of Gaza’s economy has been wiped out since the Israel-Hamas war began in October 2023. 

Creating new cryptocurrency requires large amounts of computing power, which is used to solve cryptographic puzzles in what is known as proof-of-work mining. When two miners complete a puzzle nearly simultaneously, each miner produces a valid block. This situation is known as a “fork.” Using their model, the authors can quantify the power wasted in mining blocks on top of orphaned blocks. According to the authors, this wasted energy has drastically increased over the past decade, peaking at around 16,000 MW in 2025, equivalent to half of the power generated in the United Kingdom.