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Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 13-Jun-2026 09:16 ET (13-Jun-2026 13:16 GMT/UTC)

Illinois Tech-led BioCAT wins NIH renewal to continue operating fiber diffraction beamline at Argonne’s Advanced Photon Source

Illinois Institute of Technology
Business Announcement

The Biophysics Collaborative Access Team (BioCAT)—led by Illinois Institute of Technology faculty Thomas Irving, Professor of Biology; Weikang Ma, Professor of Biology; and Jesse Hopkins, Professor of Physics—has received the first installment of $2.6 million of a renewal award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health to continue operating the BioCAT beamline at Sector 18-ID at the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory for the next five years.

MIT study shows youth may increase vulnerability to a carcinogen found in contaminated water and some drugs

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Peer-Reviewed Publication

According to a study from MIT, NDMA, a carcinogen that has been found in some drugs and drinking water contaminated by chemical plants, may have a much more severe impact on children than adults.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: National Institutes of Environmental and Health Sciences (NIEHS) Superfund Research Program, NIEHS Core Center Grant, National Institutes of Health Training Grant, Anonymous Fund for Climate Action

Anabaena learns a new trick

Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Photosynthetic bacteria helped shape Planet Earth. Among them are cyanobacteria that produced the oxygen in our atmosphere and made complex life possible, captivating scientists for decades. Now, researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) report a surprising new discovery—a system thought to separate DNA has developed to sculpt the shape of the cell in cyanobacteria instead. The results, published in Science, shed light on how protein systems evolve and how multicellularity emerged in this type of ecologically essential bacteria.

Journal: Science
Funder: Horizon 2020 Framework Programme, European Research Council, Swiss National Science Foundation, Jean-Jacques et Letitia Lopez-Loreta Foundation

Scientists create living tissues capable of changing shape in a programmed manner

Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC)
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering for Catalonia (IBEC), the Polytechnic University of Catalonia – BarcelonaTech (UPC) and the International Centre for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE) have developed a new strategy for 'programming' the shape of biological tissues in vitro.

The study, published in the journal Science, is the first to demonstrate that it is possible to guide the forces and final shape of living tissue by controlling the orientation of its cells.

The research opens the door to new applications in tissue engineering, biohybrid robotics, and the design of smart living materials.

Journal: Science
Funder: Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, Ministerio de Ciencia, European Research Council, Generalitat de Catalunya, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Ministerio de Ciencia, “la Caixa” Foundation, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Generalitat de Catalunya, Ministerio de Ciencia, European Research Council, “la Caixa” Foundation, Human Frontier Science Program

Older Americans and veterans wait longer for financial justice

University of Southern California
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study by USC Viterbi School of Engineering examining over 1.27 million federal complaints finds that older Americans and veterans are consistently receiving slower responses from financial companies, and the gap is getting worse.Service-members, including active duty, reserve, and veterans, received slower responses than the general population in every single year of the study. The gap peaked at 1.8 percentage points in 2016 before narrowing, settling at 0.3 points by 2022. The trajectory for older Americans is more alarming. In 2014, seniors were actually doing slightly better than the general population. By 2017, that advantage had evaporated, and by 2022 older adults were faring the worst of all three groups.

Journal: PNAS Nexus

New technique measures rare earth metals in living plants, boosting phytomining efforts

North Carolina State University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have developed a technique for detecting and measuring the concentration of many rare-earth elements in plants, without destroying the plant. The technique can be used to optimize “plant mining” efforts, in which plants take up and concentrate these critical materials so that they can be harvested for practical use.

Journal: Plant Direct
Funder: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency

Eliminating background artifacts in super-resolution microscopy: A risk-aware adaptive deep learning framework

Chinese Society for Optical Engineering
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The research team led by Liying Qu and Weisong Zhao from Harbin Institute of Technology, in collaboration with Peking University, has developed Adaptive-SN2N, an innovative self-supervised learning framework. By introducing a risk-aware adaptive normalization strategy, this method successfully eliminates background artifacts commonly induced by deep learning, preserving high biological fidelity and enabling highly accurate live-cell quantitative analysis.

Funder: National Key Research and Development Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Scientific Research Innovation Capability Support Project for Young Faculty, Young Elite Scientists Sponsorship Program by China Association for Science and Technology, China National Postdoctoral Program for Innovative Talents, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation, National Key Research and Development Program of China

Selective oxidation of 3-hydroxypropionic acid to malonic acid over Pd/C: Mechanistic and kinetic study

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Malonic acid is a high-value dicarboxylic acid with strong industrial demand, used in diverse products including automotive coatings, flavor and fragrances, biodegradable polymers, and anodic oxide films in batteries. Yet its current production heavily relies on petrochemical feedstocks. In a new paper, researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) report the first systematic study for sustainable production of malonic acid via oxidation of the precursor chemical 3-hydroxypropionic acid (3-HP) with a Pd/Carbon catalyst.

Journal: Applied Catalysis B Environment and Energy

Researchers uncover a ‘treasure trove’ of bioactive molecules in coral reefs

University of California - Santa Barbara
Peer-Reviewed Publication

(Santa Barbara, Calif,) — Could the next big antibiotic or cancer therapy be found on the nearest coral reef? Researchers have found that reefs are home to a vast array of previously unknown bioactive metabolites — small biomolecules that have the biotechnological potential to provide the basis for new drugs, and a host of other products.

Journal: Nature