EurekAlert! News by Subject: Tech & Engineering

Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 30-Oct-2026 22:16 ET (31-Oct-2026 02:16 GMT/UTC)

4-Jun-2026

JWST measures mass of a dormant black hole from the early universe for the first time

Carnegie Institution for Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Carnegie’s Andrew Newman led a team of astronomers that used JWST to make the first direct mass measurement of a dormant black hole at the center of a galaxy from the early universe. Previously, this technique had only been used to study black holes in the local universe. But JWST and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing enabled the researchers to use it on a galaxy that's light is reaching us from when the universe was just 3 billion years old.

Journal: Science

4-Jun-2026

Better land use and management could improve biodiversity, climate and economic development

University of California - Santa Barbara
Peer-Reviewed Publication

National governments and multilateral institutions face the difficult challenge of reconciling economic development and environmental goals. Often one appears to come at the expense of the other.

Journal: Science

4-Jun-2026

ORNL partnership helps ACP Technologies scale materials for graphite and carbon fiber

DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Business Announcement

A long-running partnership between ACP Technologies and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has helped move advanced pitch materials from laboratory development to pilot-scale production — supporting new domestic capabilities in synthetic graphite and carbon fiber manufacturing.

4-Jun-2026

RESEARCH: A new scheduling tool could help hospitals reduce surgical wait times

Concordia University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Concordia University researchers have developed an AI-powered operating room scheduling tool that plans surgeries, manages last-minute emergencies, and minimizes patient disruptions within a single framework. Tested on real hospital data, the model reduces variables compared to existing approaches, cutting wait times and day-of-surgery cancellations. The study appears in the International Journal of Production Research.

Journal: International Journal of Production Research

4-Jun-2026

MIT researchers teach AI models to interpret charts

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Reports and Proceedings

Researchers used a novel data generation pipeline to build ChartNet, a large synthetic dataset of chart images paired with corresponding information. They used this training dataset to improve the performance of generative AI models at challenging tasks like data extraction and chart reconstruction.

Funder: MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab

4-Jun-2026

Boston University joins National Science Foundation institute pushing frontiers of physics and AI

Boston University
Grant and Award Announcement

Boston University is joining the NSF AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions (IAIFI), which aims to use AI to inform physics breakthroughs—and vice versa.

4-Jun-2026

Dust-prone desert of the southwest may be ideal for solar energy, UTEP study finds

University of Texas at El Paso
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A study led by researchers at The University of Texas at El Paso concludes that photovoltaic panels in Alamogordo, New Mexico—a region frequently affected by dust storms carrying particles from the White Sands gypsum dune field—lose only about 2% to 3% of their power output because of dust accumulation, a rate far lower than that of solar facilities in comparable desert regions worldwide.

4-Jun-2026

A breakthrough single-cell method for mapping DNA-protein interactions

Weill Cornell Medicine
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new technology allows scientists to map, in single cells, the DNA binding sites of transcription factors and other regulatory proteins that control gene activity, according to a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine and the New York Genome Center. With key advantages over methods currently in use, the technology is expected to be a powerful addition to biologists’ toolkit for studying cells in health and disease.

Journal: Cell

4-Jun-2026

World Cup sets stage for UT Arlington environmental study

University of Texas at Arlington
Business Announcement

With millions of visitors expected in North Texas during the FIFA World Cup, researchers at The University of Texas at Arlington will conduct a field experiment to measure how large crowds, increased traffic and more flights affect the air quality around AT&T Stadium.