⚖ Engineering Press Releases

Osaka, Japan — Modern polymer materials face a fundamental challenge: they must remain strong and durable during use, yet ideally degrade when they are no longer needed. Designing materials that satisfy both requirements has long been a major challenge in polymer science. Researchers at The University of Osaka have now developed a molecular design strategy that reconciles these competing demands. By introducing movable molecular rings (cyclodextrins) into a polymer network, the team created a tough material whose enzymatic degradation can be switched on or off using light. In conventional polymer materials, strong mechanical properties are typically achieved by ...

Autonomous vehicles (AVs), which already operate on the roads of several major U.S. cities and in countries worldwide, are expected to play a large role in shaping the future of cities. In a new study, researchers investigated how AVs may change travel patterns during morning commutes and affect parking in business districts. By providing insights into the changes associated with parking and traffic congestion as the use of AVs rises, the study can inform urban planning efforts. Conducted by researchers ...

Researchers at the University of St Andrews used drones to film sperm whales headbutting one another in the Azores and Balearic Islands - the first scientific documentation of a behavior that 19th-century whalers described and that inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Surprisingly, it was sub-adults, not large males, engaging in the collisions.

With 45% of flowering plants at risk of extinction and the fragrance market heading toward $100 billion by 2034, researchers argue in BioScience that the industry must move past sustainability branding and directly finance plant conservation.

Corals, jellyfish, and sea anemones share a common ancestor but have wildly different body shapes. A new study identifies three mechanical tissue properties - 'mechanotypes' - that predict and even control which form an organism takes.

People often seem to understand language before they have actually heard enough words to determine its structure. In everyday conversation, listeners react immediately, anticipate what others will say, and rarely wait for a sentence to finish. This raises the question of how the brain is able to keep up with such rapid communication. In a new study, an international team of researchers, led by Associate Professor Chie Nakamura from the School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, Japan, investigated how listeners interpret structurally ambiguous sentences in ...

Every time a tree trunk is sawn, it creates sawdust. Millions of tonnes of sawdust are produced every year worldwide, with most of it is burned to generate energy. This releases the carbon dioxide stored in the wood back into the atmosphere – which is not ideal from an environmental perspective. Now, a team of researchers at the Chair of Wood Materials Science at ETH Zurich and Empa has developed a process that can convert sawdust into a recyclable and environmentally friendly composite using the mineral struvite, a crystalline, colourless ammonium magnesium phosphate. This, in turn, keeps the sawdust in the material cycle for longer.  Struvite has ...

A UC San Diego-led team demonstrated that acoustic waves can controllably move mechanical kinks - boundaries between soft and stiff regions - through a specially designed material, creating what amounts to remote control over how a material feels and behaves.

Less than 2% of nitrile rubber gets recycled. Chemists at St Andrews developed two catalytic routes that convert used nitrile gloves into polyamines and polyols - useful industrial chemicals - with the polyamines also capable of capturing carbon dioxide from emissions.

Using atomic force microscopy at sub-nanometer resolution, researchers directly observed three distinct types of motion within a single polymer chain at a solid surface, revealing non-equilibrium behavior that challenges conventional models of adhesion.

The C-SINC project replaces part of Portland cement clinker with magnesium carbonates formed by reacting magnesium silicates with captured CO2, permanently binding the carbon in mineral form.

Pitt researchers engineered the harmless eye bacterium Corynebacterium mastitidis to secrete interleukin-10, creating a 'living eye drop' that accelerated corneal healing in mice and showed promise in human cell tests.

In a study of over 62,000 participants, loneliness partially accounted for the link between anxiety or depressive symptoms and suicidal ideation. Tackling loneliness directly may offer a way to interrupt the progression toward suicidal thinking that cuts across diagnostic categories.

A novel biochar engineered with sulfur and iron can simultaneously lock down arsenic and cadmium in contaminated agricultural soils - two pollutants with opposing chemical behavior that have resisted joint remediation until now. Field trials show bioavailable cadmium cut by 41% and arsenic by 64%.

A rotating arm device the size of a laboratory bench can now replicate the wireless charging conditions of a full-scale EV test track, reproducing 3-kilowatt power transfer at 40 km/h and potentially opening dynamic charging research to smaller academic institutions.

Aarhus University chemists shredded nitrile rubber gloves and reacted them with a ruthenium catalyst and hydrogen gas to produce a material that captures CO2 from simulated flue gas and releases it on heating - currently at lab scale (TRL 3-4) with an expensive catalyst.

A new study shows biochar reduces nitrous oxide emissions more effectively than lime in acidic upland soils, but increases them significantly in flooded rice paddies - with the difference traced to distinct microbial pathways activated by soil water content.

A new book by Heriot Watt's Susan Roaf and colleagues argues that glass-walled air-conditioned buildings are ill-equipped for a hotter future, and that passive cooling techniques from South East Asia and traditional design principles offer a more sustainable alternative.

UC Irvine computer scientists demonstrated that a specially patterned umbrella can fool autonomous tracking drones into believing their target is moving away, drawing the aircraft within capture or crash range. The FlyTrap attack succeeded against three commercial drones and has been disclosed to manufacturers DJI and HoverAir.

Shibaura Institute of Technology's MambaAlign framework fuses RGB cameras with thermal or depth sensors using state-space processing to detect industrial defects, improving pixel-level anomaly localization by ~6.5% and running close to 30 fps - enough for real production lines.

A Complexity Science Hub and Harvard Growth Lab study of 1.6 million patents found U.S. technological dominance arose from a concentrated shift in the early 1920s, when industrial research labs replaced individual inventors - but systematically excluded women and immigrants.

Vipin Kumar, a composites manufacturing researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, has been named to the American Composites Manufacturers Association's 2026 Emerging Leaders Program. Kumar's work spans large-scale polymer additive manufacturing, carbon fiber-reinforced composites, and lightning strike protection for aerospace applications. He holds three granted patents with 12 more pending.

A survey of 1,515 boys and men found that social media use - particularly exposure to content promoting muscular ideals and muscle-building drugs, and engagement in body comparisons - was more strongly associated with intentions to use anabolic-androgenic steroids than raw screen time. Researchers say media literacy and marketing regulation deserve attention alongside general screen time guidance.

Engineers at Shibaura Institute of Technology tested 35 model-scale configurations of a composite pile system that uses surplus construction soil as structural fill, finding uplift capacities matching or exceeding conventional steel piles when soil compaction is maintained. A 20% drop in soil density caused roughly 50% reduction in uplift capacity -- making compaction control the critical construction variable.

Columbia Engineering researchers developed a gel polymer electrolyte with a salt-phobic polymer network that reorganizes lithium ion solvation at the nanoscale. Anode-free pouch cells using the material retained over 80% capacity after hundreds of demanding cycles and survived aggressive drilling without thermal runaway - a failure mode that destroys conventional liquid electrolyte cells.