Engineering
press releases.

Engineering26 Jul 2024

CDA creates new industry partner program

The University of Illinois Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) has launched a new partnership program for industry members to strengthen their ties to academia, technology, multidisciplinary research and professional development in a joint effort to tackle the globe’s most pressing agricultural challenges. Unveiled in June, the CDA Industry Partner Program (IPP) offers members the opportunity to collaborate with world-renowned researchers and field experts to solve complex problems facing the industry, whether they stem from a changing climate, personnel shortages or any other hurdles that spring up. IPP ...

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Engineering25 Jul 2024

An effective strategy to inhibit grain coarsening: Construction of multi-element co-segregated grain boundary complexion

To date, ceramic scientists have devised various strategies to impede grain coarsening. The utilization of nano-sized precursor powder can not only facilitate the densification process, but also yields bulk ceramics with reduced grain sizes compared with micron-sized precursor powder. Rapid sintering by passes the low-temperature surface diffusion stage and directly enters the high-temperature sintering stage through rapid heating, rendering it an effective way to inhibit grain coarsening. However, these aforementioned strategies fail to prevent coarsening during the application of nano-ceramics in medium- ...

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Engineering24 Jul 2024

A brittle interface with low modulus to improve the mechanical properties of multiphase ceramics: A unique design approach?

Barium strontium aluminum silicate (BaxSr1−xAl2Si2O8, BSAS) ceramics possess both phase stability and resistance to water vapor corrosion, making them ideal materials for radome technology and electronic packaging. To address the low tolerance of BSAS ceramics to damage and defects, the introduction of nano-reinforcements is an effective approach to enhance their strength and toughness. SiC nanowires (SiCnws) exhibit high strength and hardness inherited from SiC ceramics, along with the excellent toughness and elasticity ...

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Engineering23 Jul 2024

OptoGPT: building foundation models for multilayer thin film design

A new publication from Opto-Electronic Advances; DOI 10.29026/oea.2024.240062, discusses OptoGPT, a new inverse design algorithm. Optical multilayer thin film structure is one of the most important photonic structures widely used in many applications, including color filters, absorbers, optical cavities or resonators, photovoltaic and radiative cooling, special mirrors for extreme UV lithography and for space telescopes. Designing these structures requires much training and expertise as identifying the best combination of materials and the thickness at ...

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Engineering23 Jul 2024

Lehigh University team wins 2024 Alfred Noble Prize for work on optimizing bridge maintenance

Lehigh University structural engineering alum Xu Han ’23 PhD and his doctoral advisor Professor Dan M. Frangopol have been awarded the 2024 Alfred Noble Prize, an esteemed interdisciplinary award from a consortium of professional societies, administered by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). “I feel very humbled for receiving such a prestigious award and am very grateful to people nominating me,” says Han, who is now a postdoctoral research fellow at Texas A&M University. Frangopol, Lehigh’s inaugural Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture, is a world-renowned expert ...

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Engineering20 Jul 2024

Texas A&M engineers explore intelligence augmentation to improve safety

Artificial intelligence (AI) has grown rapidly in the last few years, and with that increase, industries have been able to automate and improve their efficiency in operations. A feature article published in AIChE Journal identifies the challenges and benefits of using Intelligence Augmentation (IA) in process safety systems. Contributors to this work are Dr. Faisal Khan, professor and chemical engineering department head at Texas A&M University, Dr. Stratos Pistikopoulos, professor and director of the Energy Institute, Drs. Rajeevan Arunthavanathan, Tanjin Amin, and Zaman Sajid from the Mary Kay O’Connor Safety Center. Additionally, Dr. Yuhe ...

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Engineering19 Jul 2024

Researchers clarify how soft materials fail under stress

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Understanding how soft materials fail under stress is critical for solving engineering challenges as disparate as pharmaceutical technology and landslide prevention. A new study linking a spectrum of soft material behaviors — previously thought to be unrelated — led researchers to identify a new parameter they call the brittility factor, which allows them to simplify soft material failure behavior. This will ultimately help engineers design better materials that meet future challenges. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Simon Rogers and graduate student Krutarth Kamani specialize ...

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Engineering18 Jul 2024

Engineering: Tool predicts rogue waves up to 5 minutes in advance

A new tool that can be used to predict the emergence of unusually large and unpredictable waves at sea — known as rogue waves — up to five minutes into the future is presented in a study published in Scientific Reports. The authors suggest that the tool could be used to issue advance warnings to ships and offshore platforms to enable those working on them to seek shelter, perform emergency shutdowns, or manoeuvre to minimise the impacts of approaching rogue waves. The tool developed by Thomas Breunung and Balakumar Balachandran consists of a neural network that has been trained ...

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Engineering17 Jul 2024

Llama nanobodies: A breakthrough in building HIV immunity

ATLANTA — A research team at Georgia State University has developed tiny, potent molecules that are capable of targeting hidden strains of HIV. The source? Antibody genes from llama DNA. The research, led by Assistant Professor of Biology Jianliang Xu, uses llama-derived nanobodies to broadly neutralize numerous strains of HIV-1, the most common form of the virus. A new study from this team has been published in the journal Advanced Science. “This virus has evolved a way to escape our immune system. Conventional antibodies are bulky, so it’s difficult for them to find and attack the virus’ surface,” ...

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Engineering17 Jul 2024

Engineering resilience: Advanced FEM enhances earthquake impact assessment

In a significant advancement for geotechnical engineering, a refined space-time finite element method (v-ST/FEM) has been introduced to tackle the complex dynamics of soil-structure interaction during seismic events. This new approach allows for more accurate simulations of the response of earth structures to earthquake vibrations, marking a crucial step in improving infrastructure resilience against natural disasters. Designing structures like dams, tunnels, and embankments to withstand transient loads from sources such as earthquakes, high-speed trains, and explosions requires robust dynamic soil-structure interaction (SSI) analysis. Traditional methods often fall short in handling ...

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Engineering17 Jul 2024

Tobacco industry is specifically targeting Arab and Ultra-Orthodox news media in Israel

A recent study revealed that there are significant disparities in how Philip Morris International's IQOS heated tobacco product is portrayed in newspapers and other media aimed at different demographic groups in Israel. Specifically, news media targeted at Israel's Arab population tends to present IQOS more positively and is more likely to include misinformation regarding its safety, social benefits, and accessibility, often relying on PMI as a primary information source. This contrasts with the portrayal ...

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Engineering16 Jul 2024

Pocket-sized invention revolutionizes ability to detect harmful materials

Imagine knowing what berry or mushroom is safe to eat during a hike or swiftly detecting pathogens in a hospital setting that would traditionally require days to identify. Identification and detection of drugs, chemicals and biological molecules invisible to the human eye can be made possible through the combined technology of a cellphone camera and a Raman spectrometer — a powerful laser chemical analysis method. Dr. Peter Rentzepis, a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M ...

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Engineering12 Jul 2024

Challenges and prospects for post-conflict peacebuilding in urban settings

Wars and conflicts leave devastating destruction in their wake. With so many conflicts now taking place in urban environments, scientists are studying how post-conflict peacebuilding happens in these urban settings. Dahlia Simangan, an associate professor at The IDEC Institute, Hiroshima University, has analyzed the case of Marawi, a city in the Philippines, to better understand the urban environment’s influence on post-siege reconstruction and peacebuilding. This study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of peacebuilding by integrating conventional peacebuilding components and urban characteristics. The findings are published ...

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Engineering11 Jul 2024

First ever 3D reconstruction of 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth chromosomes thanks to serendipitously freeze-dried skin

An international research team has assembled the genome and 3D chromosomal structures of a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth—the first time such a feat has been achieved for any ancient DNA sample. The fossilized chromosomes, which are around a million times longer than most ancient DNA fragments, provide insight into how the mammoth’s genome was organized within its living cells and which genes were active within the skin tissue from which the DNA was extracted. This unprecedented level of structural detail was retained because ...

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Engineering11 Jul 2024

Shaping the future of polymer nanocarriers

Scientists have taken a significant step towards the development of tailor-made chiral nanocarriers with controllable release properties. These nanocarriers, inspired by nature's helical molecules like DNA and proteins, hold immense potential for targeted drug delivery and other biomedical applications. The study, led by Professors Emilio Quiñoá and Félix Freire at the Center for Research in Biological Chemistry and Molecular Materials (CiQUS), highlights the intricate relationship between the structure of helical polymers and their self-assembly into nanospheres. By carefully designing ...

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Engineering9 Jul 2024

Trust, more than knowledge, critical for acceptance of fully autonomous vehicles

PULLMAN, Wash. – While not yet on the market, fully autonomous vehicles are promoted as a way to make road travel dramatically safer, but a recent study found that knowing more about them did not improve people’s perception of their risk. They needed to have more trust in them too. This study adds to the evidence from other research that knowledge alone is not enough to sway people’s attitudes toward complex technology and science, such as gene editing or climate change. In this case, Washington State University researchers found that trust in the autonomous vehicles’ reliability and performance played the strongest role in improving ...

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Engineering5 Jul 2024

MIT engineers find a way to protect microbes from extreme conditions

Microbes that are used for health, agricultural, or other applications need to be able to withstand extreme conditions, and ideally the manufacturing processes used to make tablets for long-term storage. MIT researchers have now developed a new way to make microbes hardy enough to withstand these extreme conditions. Their method involves mixing bacteria with food and drug additives from a list of compounds that the FDA classifies as “generally regarded as safe.” The researchers identified formulations that help to stabilize several different types ...

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Engineering2 Jul 2024

Precise and less expensive 3D printing of complex, high-resolution structures

WASHINGTON — Researchers have developed a new two-photon polymerization technique that uses two lasers to 3D print complex high-resolution structures. The advance could make this 3D printing process less expensive, helping it find wider use in a variety of applications. Two-photon polymerization is an advanced additive manufacturing technique that traditionally uses femtosecond lasers to polymerize materials in a precise, 3D manner. Although this process works well for making high-resolution microstructures, it isn’t widely used in manufacturing ...

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Engineering2 Jul 2024

Researchers achieve dual-functional supramolecular materials

Versatile molecular frameworks called discrete supramolecular structures act like microscopic building blocks customizable for a wide variety of applications. The structures can serve in drug delivery, provide unique environments for catalytic reactions or plug into a molecular machine. In their paper published June 25 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, researchers from Yokohama National University presented a new methodology to advance self-assembly of dual-functional supramolecular materials. Self-assembly involves the spontaneous generation of a well-defined, discrete supramolecular architecture from ...

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Engineering2 Jul 2024

FDA staff leaving for industry jobs given “behind the scenes” lobbying advice

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) tells staff leaving for industry jobs that, despite restrictions on post-employment lobbying, they are still permitted to influence the agency, reveals an investigation by The BMJ today. Internal emails, obtained under a freedom of information request, show how two FDA officials who worked on covid-19 vaccine approvals were proactively informed by FDA ethics staff about their ability to indirectly lobby the agency as they left for jobs with Moderna. The record shows that since 2000 every FDA commissioner, the agency’s highest position, has gone on to work ...

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Engineering28 Jun 2024

Tissue bridges are reliable predictors of recovery from cervical spine injuries

The results of the longitudinal study “Prognostic value of tissue bridges in cervical spinal cord injury” have the potential to change clinical practice. They have just been published in The Lancet Neurology, the world’s leading journal of clinical neurology. The team led by lead author Dr. Dario Pfyffer and senior author Prof. Dr. med. Patrick Freund from Balgrist University Hospital and the University of Zurich, which includes SCI experts from around the world, has successfully developed models that incorporate tissue bridges in the spinal cord in a large, multicenter cohort of patients with cervical SCI for improved prognosis of clinical outcomes. These ...

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Engineering28 Jun 2024

Adults conceived by donors left behind by fertility industry

Children conceived by using egg or sperm donors have the same well-being outcomes as non-donor conceived people. However, they are more likely to have identity difficulties and issues with trust. Secrecy and anonymity about their genetic parentage can have a profound impact on well-being say authors. They warn that children and adults conceived using donor gametes have not been centred in the assisted reproductive industry and more information is needed about adult wellbeing. The study is published today in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology by researchers King’s College London. The study is the first systematic ...

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Engineering27 Jun 2024

$10.5M biomaterials center to connect researchers, fund innovation and fight resource discrimination

Images Simultaneously advancing biomaterials research with clinical applications and connecting researchers at well-resourced institutions with those rich in diverse talent is the aim of a $10.5 million center supported by the National Institutes of Health. The Humanity Unlocking Biomaterials center, led by the University of Michigan and University of Washington, is designed to spur the development of biomaterials solutions that have potential in medical treatments by bringing together researchers and providing seed funding to kickstart ...

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Engineering27 Jun 2024

Materials research revolutionized by a small change

Like the flutter of a butterfly's wings, sometimes small and minute changes can lead to big and unexpected results and changes in our lives. Recently, a team of researchers at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) made a very small change to develop a material called “spin-orbit torque (SOT),” which is a hot topic in next-generation DRAM memory. This research team, led by Professor Daesu Lee and Yongjoo Jo, a PhD candidate, from the Department of Physics and Professor Si-Young ...

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Engineering26 Jun 2024

Simple new process stores CO2 in concrete without compromising strength

By using a carbonated — rather than a still — water-based solution during the concrete manufacturing process, a Northwestern University-led team of engineers has discovered a new way to store carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ubiquitous construction material. Not only could the new process help sequester CO2 from the ever-warming atmosphere, it also results in concrete with uncompromised strength and durability. In laboratory experiments, the process achieved a CO2 sequestration efficiency of up to 45%, meaning that nearly ...

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