Before humans can colonize the moon or Mars, scientists and engineers must first develop techniques for building permanent structures and pressurized habitats in harsh, thin-atmosphere and low-gravity environments.

Dr. Wei Li, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas, is developing a virtual lunar welding platform to troubleshoot assembling large structures in such conditions.

It’s a game a lot of us played as children—and maybe even later in life: unspooling measuring tape to see how far it would extend before bending. But to engineers at the University of California San Diego, this game was an inspiration, suggesting that measuring tape could become a great material for a robotic gripper. The grippers would be a particularly good fit for agriculture applications, as their extremities are soft enough to grab fragile fruits and vegetables, researchers wrote. The devices are also low-cost and safe around humans.

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today announced that Jingsheng Jason Cong, the holder of the Volgenau Chair for Engineering Excellence at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, is the recipient of the 2024 ACM Charles P. “Chuck” Thacker Breakthrough in Computing Award. Cong is recognized for fundamental contributions to the design and automation of field-programmable systems and customizable computing.

A Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) researcher is developing a new class of medical adhesives by bringing together hydrogels and glue-like polymers to safely and reliably connect human tissues to therapeutic devices implanted in the body, such as pacemakers, insulin pumps, and artificial joints.