Leadership from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Volkswagen Group of America and Oak Ridge National Laboratory celebrated more than a decade of collaboration and the fifth anniversary of the Volkswagen Innovation Hub Knoxville on April 24. 

Three University of Texas at Arlington faculty members were recognized for their research and creative contributions as part of the faculty research honors. J. Ping Liu, professor of physics, received the University Award for Distinguished Record of Research or Creative Activity. Kyrah Brown, associate professor of kinesiology, and Ben Jones, associate professor of physics, received the University Award for Outstanding Research or Creative Accomplishment.

A study of statewide data on North Carolina high school teachers who teach computer science and their students' learning outcomes suggests that these teachers were better qualified than their peers teaching other subjects, even those at the same schools. Learning outcomes were based on the proportion of students who took advanced placement tests in computer science and their test scores.

Following on from the recent official launch of BGI’s new CycloneSEQ™ is the first independently reviewed benchmarking data. The CycloneSEQ™ platform delivers long-reads using novel nanopore technology. This study tests the performance of a new platform in sequencing diverse microbial genomes and presents both the raw and processed data to allow others to scrutinize and verify the work. To provide further transparency, the peer-reviews, scripts and protocols of this benchmarking process are also included, allowing others to directly assess this new technology. By directly reading  DNA molecules without fragmentation, the analysis demonstrates that CycloneSEQ delivers long-read data with impressive length and accuracy, unlocking gaps that short-read technologies alone cannot bridge. This work has been published in the open-science journal GigaByte.

Assistant professor of chemical engineering Jason Bates wants deeper studies of new catalyst designs before declaring any one of them the next big thing.

Many products in the modern world are in some way fabricated using computer numerical control (CNC) machines, which use computers to automate machine operations in manufacturing. While simple in concept, the ways to instruct these machines is in reality often complex. A team of researchers including those from the University of Tokyo devised a system to demonstrate how to mitigate some of this complexity. Draw2Cut allows users to draw desired designs directly onto material to be cut or milled. In this case, color-coded lines drawn with standard marker pens instruct the Draw2Cut system to mill designs into wood without any prior knowledge of CNC machines or their typical workflows.

University of Pittsburgh engineers have developed a 3D bioprinting method that creates collagen-based scaffolds, allowing cells to grow and self-organize into functional tissues. Led by Daniel Shiwarski, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon’s Adam Feinberg, the team designed high-resolution, perfusable scaffolds (CHIPS) that integrate with a custom bioreactor (VAPOR), enabling vascularized tissue models. Published in Science Advances, this platform offers an organicl alternative to synthetic microfluidic devices, with potential to advance disease modeling and reduce reliance on animal testing.