The SETI Institute announced that nominations are now open for the 2026 Tarter Award for Innovation in the Search for Life Beyond Earth. The Tarter Award recognizes individuals whose projects or ideas significantly advance humanity’s search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence. 

Named in honor of Dr. Jill Tarter, SETI Institute co-founder and leader in the field of SETI research, the award celebrates contributions across science, technology, education, art, philosophy, law and ethics that support the SETI Institute’s mission to search for life and intelligence beyond Earth. Tarter received the inaugural Tarter Award in 2024.

“The SETI Institute’s Tarter Award recognizes innovators whose creativity produces a concept that helps improve the search for intelligent life beyond Earth, even though its original purpose was something entirely different,” said Tarter. “Although the Keder Welt was invented so long ago that no official inventor has ever been identified, the person who came up with that exceedingly efficient way of attaching fabric sails to a ship’s mast has greatly improved the antennas of the Allen Telescope Array, allowing a radome cover to protect the sensitive electronics at the heart of the signal detection system. We are looking for other creative individuals and their creations that we can use in unexpected ways to do our mission better.”

Researchers demonstrated a new method of cooling trapped ions using chip-based systems, which could enable more stable and scalable quantum computers and quantum sensors.

Rice’s Naomi Halas, Peter Nordlander and Hossein Robajatzi have been awarded the 2026 Hill Prize in Engineering for their work advancing light-driven technologies for sustainable ammonia synthesis.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences has gone in this eighteenth edition to physicists Allan MacDonald (The University of Texas at Austin) and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT) for their discoveries concerning the “magic angle” that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled. What the committee terms the “pioneering” insights of the two researchers have provided both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a whole new field, now known as twistronics, where superconductivity, magnetism and other target properties can be obtained by rotating new materials such as graphene.