Research & Development World

The A.M. Turing Award, one of the biggest awards in computer science, has been awarded to Charles Bennett, a physicist at IBM, and Gilles Brassard, a computer scientist at the University of Montreal, for “their essential role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.” The award, given by…

Automated liquid dispensing machines must deliver high precision, repeatable performance, and compact design to function effectively in laboratory environments. A crucial factor in meeting these requirements is the electric drive system that powers the movement of the pipetting head. Sandro Walter, maxon’s Business Development Manager for Laboratory Automation, outlines the essential engineering considerations behind these…

Droplet Biosciences, a diagnostics company using lymph-based liquid biopsy testing, is reducing genomic analysis time with NVIDIA AI infrastructure, improving test turnaround times.  Unlike blood tests, which are widely used for minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring, lymphatic fluid allows for earlier collection and increased sensitivity. Droplet has found that postsurgical lymphatic fluid has 130 times…

Near-field optical trapping allows for contact-free control of objects, including nanoparticles and living cells. This is traditionally done using whispering-gallery-mode and waveguide-based platforms that rely on evanescent fields that only penetrate about 100 nanometers into the surrounding medium. This shallow interaction restricts trapping efficiency and makes the system highly sensitive to perturbations, limiting the practical…

Dr. Hongyou Fan was named R&D Researcher of the Year for his pioneering work across chemical science, materials science, and nanotechnology. The research has advanced Department of Energy missions in science, energy, and national security for over two decades. The video below shows his acceptance speech at the 2025 R&D 100 Gala in Scottsdale. His…

When a new homeowner in Southwest Michigan posted a photo of a vintage can of ethyl ether found in their basement to a large online chemistry forum on Reddit, the poster was just looking for cheap disposal advice. What they got instead was a chorus of terrified chemists and former hazardous waste technicians telling them…

Sodium-ion batteries enter mass production. Calcium-ion cells clear 1,000 cycles. And a counterintuitive discovery at Surrey challenges decades of battery-chemistry orthodoxy. On February 5, 2026, CATL and Changan Automobile unveiled what CATL called the world’s first mass-production passenger vehicle equipped with sodium-ion batteries. The vehicle, powered by CATL’s Naxtra cells at an energy density of…

Superconducting materials can carry electricity with zero resistance, but two persistent problems have kept them out of most real-world electronics: they need to be cooled to extreme temperatures, and strong magnetic fields tend to destroy the superconducting state. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology report a new material design strategy that pushes back on both…

NASA announced a series of agency-wide initiatives designed to achieve President Trump’s National Space Policy on Tuesday. The initiatives include building a Moon base, a plan for continuous American presence on the International Space Station, several science missions and a nuclear-powered interplanetary spacecraft.  “NASA is committed to achieving the near‑impossible once again, to return to…