⚙ Technology Press Releases

A new study from the University of British Columbia has found that artificial turf fields across Metro Vancouver leach 6PPD-quinone, a chemical known to kill coho salmon, into municipal stormwater systems—and the contamination persists long after the fields are installed. Researchers traced the pollution to crumb rubber infill made from recycled tires, a material widely used on synthetic turf fields. The team found it consistently released 6PPD-quinone and other contaminants across fields of different ages. “An average turf field contains about 125 tonnes of crumb rubber, roughly 20,000 tires,” said Katie Moloney, a PhD student ...

A robot that can locate lost items on command – this is the latest development at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). It combines knowledge from the internet with a spatial map of its surroundings to efficiently find the objects being sought. The new robot from Prof. Angela Schoellig’s TUM Learning Systems and Robotics Lab looks like a broomstick on wheels with a camera mounted at the top. It is one of the first robots that not only integrates image understanding but also applies it to a clearly defined task. To find a pair of glasses misplaced in the kitchen, for example, the robot has to look around and ...

Heart disease is the leading cause of adult death worldwide, making cardiovascular disease diagnosis and management a global health priority. An echocardiogram, or cardiac ultrasound, is one of the most commonly used imaging tools employed by physicians to diagnose a variety of heart diseases and conditions.   Most standard echocardiograms provide two-dimensional visual images (2D) of the three-dimensional (3D) cardiac anatomy. These echocardiograms often capture hundreds of 2D slices or views of a beating heart that can enable physicians to make clinical assessments ...

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (03/17/2026) — New paired studies from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities show that machine-learning can improve the prediction of floods. The studies, published in Water Resources Research and the Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, demonstrate how "knowledge-guided" artificial intelligence can assist forecasters in saving lives and protecting infrastructure as the frequency of extreme weather increases.  The research was a collaboration among the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and ...

Among the primary concerns surrounding artificial intelligence is its tendency to yield erroneous information when summarizing long documents. These “hallucinations” are problematic not only because they convey falsehoods, but also because they reduce efficiency—sorting through content to search for mistakes of AI outputs is time-consuming. To help address this challenge, a team of computer scientists has created an algorithmic framework that draws from a natural phenomenon—bird flocking—by mimicking how birds efficiently self-organize. The framework serves as a preprocessing step for large language models ...

Philadelphia, March 17, 2026 – Researchers at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) found that a new automated tobacco treatment system integrated into routine pediatric care helped drive a 3.9% absolute increase in smoking cessation among mothers – a population-level impact that could translate to tens of thousands of parents quitting each year and protect hundreds of thousands of children from harmful secondhand smoke exposure. The study, published today in Pediatrics, demonstrates how technology can scale ...

New research from the University of Waterloo shows that artificial intelligence (AI) still struggles with some basic software development tasks, raising questions about how reliably AI systems can assist developers.   As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly incorporated into software development, developers have struggled to ensure that AI-generated responses are accurate, consistent, and easy to integrate into larger development workflows.   Previously, LLMs ...

Researchers at Rice University recently convened an international group of scientists to explore how artificial intelligence and machine learning could transform one of the world’s most ambitious physics experiments: the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE). Held March 10-12 at Rice’s BioScience Research Collaborative, the three-day workshop brought together researchers from universities, national laboratories and international partners to discuss how the experiment’s software and computing infrastructure can better support the growing role of AI and ...

A new computational tool infers changes occurring at the ends of the chromosomes housing our DNA. It does so by detecting structural alterations in cells and tissues captured in images taken of routine medical biopsies, according to findings published March 16, 2026, in Cell Reports Methods. Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute developed the TLPath model based on the hypothesis that modifications in the shape and structure of cells and tissues could be used to predict the length of repeating sections of DNA called ...

BALTIMORE, MD, March 14, 2026, Dr. Thomas Hartung, Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has endorsed the public launch of ToxIndex, an agentic AI platform developed by Insilica Inc. that produces comprehensive, source-traceable toxicological risk assessments in just a few hours. The launch of ToxIndex meets a critical need in chemical and drug safety, as well as in exposomics, a field of study that considers the effects of environmental exposures on human health and serves as a complement and counterpart to ...

Dielectric ceramic capacitors are essential core components for electronics, smart grids and new energy vehicles, prized for their high power density. As electronic devices move toward miniaturization and intelligence, the demand for lead-free dielectric ceramics with ultrahigh recoverable energy storage density (Wrec) and high efficiency (η) is becoming increasingly urgent. Relaxor ferroelectrics (RFE) suffer from relatively large remnant polarization, while superparaelectric relaxor ferroelectrics (SPE-RFE) see ...

SAN ANTONIO — March 16, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has received a contract from the U.S Air Force Academy to characterize inspection methods for bolt holes in aging aircraft to inspect through bushings without removing them. Assessing bolt hole condition inspection supports wider efforts that inform repair decisions and ensure aircraft safety. For decades, SwRI has supported the U.S. Air Force’s Aircraft Structural Integrity Program (ASIP) and the U.S. Air Force Academy Center for Aircraft Structural Life Extension ...

PULLMAN, Wash. — Again and again, Washington State University professor Mesut Cicek and his colleagues fed hypotheses from scientific papers into ChatGPT and asked it to determine whether the statements had been upheld by research — whether they were true or false. They did this with more than 700 hypotheses, repeating each query 10 times. AI answered correctly 76.5% of the time when the experiment was run in 2024. When it was repeated in 2025, the accuracy improved to 80%. When accounting for random guessing, however, AI was only about 60% better than chance ...

Climate change threatens global food security; however, climate mitigation policies may increase hunger risk by driving competition for land through bioenergy production and afforestation. Based on simulations from six global agroeconomic models, researchers from The University of Tokyo, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto University, National Institute for Environmental Studies, and E-Konzal Co. Ltd, together with collaborators from other countries, report that the ozone reduction benefits of climate mitigation ...

Recommender systems suggest potentially relevant content by evaluating user preferences and are essential in reducing information overload. However, when users join a new online platform, recommendation systems often struggle to understand their preferences. With no prior interactions in the new environment, these ‘cold-start’ users are difficult to serve accurately. One promising solution is cross-domain recommendation (CDR), which transfers knowledge about a user’s tastes from one domain to another. However, many existing cross-domain systems rely heavily on a user’s highly rated items while ignoring low ratings. In fact, dislikes can be just as informative ...

BALTIMORE, MD, March 14, 2026, Dr. Thomas Hartung, Director of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (CAAT) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, has endorsed the public launch of an agentic AI platform developed by Insilica Inc. that produces comprehensive, source-traceable toxicological risk assessments in just a few hours. The launch of ToxIndex meets a critical need in chemical and drug safety as well as within field of exposomics, a field of study which considers environmental exposures effect on human health and serves as a compliment and counterpart to genomics. An ...

INDIANAPOLIS, DATE  — Indiana is reimagining education for the data-driven age. Following December’s Indiana Call to Action Summit: Strengthening the Data Science Thread—hosted by the Indiana Department of Education and Data Science 4 Everyone—leaders have passed House Bill 1266 to make data science a fundamental part of every Hoosier’s education. At the summit, educators, policymakers, and industry experts agreed: empowering students to reason with data is essential for future-ready graduates. Teachers explored new strategies to connect math, science, and social studies with real-world ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The Precision Medicine World Conference 2026 (PMWC 2026), held March 4–6 in Silicon Valley, convened researchers, clinicians, and technology leaders to discuss advances in precision medicine and the integration of artificial intelligence into biomedical research. The 2026 meeting coincided with the 25th anniversary of the first draft publication of the Human Genome Project first draft publication, highlighting the continued convergence of genomics, computational biology, and AI. At the conference, Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, Founder and CEO of Insilico ...

MLIP calculations successfully identify suitable dopants for a novel photocatalytic material, report researchers from Institute of Science Tokyo. As demonstrated in their latest study, a materials informatics approach could predict which ions can be stably introduced into orthorhombic Sn3O4, a promising and recently discovered photocatalytic tin oxide. Their experiments revealed that aluminum-doped samples achieved 16 times greater hydrogen production than the undoped material, paving the way for next-generation clean energy applications. Building a sustainable hydrogen economy requires clean and efficient ways to produce hydrogen at scale. One particularly ...

Researchers at Mass General Brigham have developed a series of artificial intelligence (AI) tools that uses machine learning to identify individuals who may be at risk for intimate partner violence (IPV) using information from their electronic medical records (EMRs). In a study published in npj Women’s Health, the researchers report the tools could detect IPV up to four years before the individual sought care at a domestic violence treatment center. The findings highlight its potential for proactive screening and supporting healthcare providers in initiating earlier conversations about IPV with patients. "Our research offers proof of concept that AI can support clinicians ...

Researchers at Nagoya University in Japan, in collaboration with university spinout NU-Rei Co., Ltd., are presenting six advances in the growth of gallium oxide (Ga₂O₃), a semiconductor material with strong potential for next-generation power devices used in electric vehicles, power conversion systems, and space applications. Gallium oxide is attracting growing interest in the power semiconductor industry because it can in principle produce higher voltage devices with relatively abundant, lower-cost raw materials. The results are being presented at the spring meeting of the Japan Society of Applied Physics (March 15-18, 2026) by a research group ...

AI-powered toys that “talk” with young children should be more tightly regulated and carry new safety kitemarks, according to a report that warns they are not always developed with children’s psychological safety in mind. The recommendation appears in the initial report from AI in the Early Years: a University of Cambridge project and the first systematic study of how Generative AI (GenAI) toys capable of human-like conversation may influence development in the critical years up ...

Many teens dealing with weight issues are turning to AI models to help them create meal plans with the aim of losing weight. But a new study shows that the resulting plans may not always adequately cover necessary nutrients and calorie intake. Researchers in Turkey compared the meal planning abilities of five AI models, prompting them to create meal plans for teenagers trying to lose weight and compared the results against the recommendations of a registered dietician. They published their findings in Frontiers in Nutrition. “We ...

EMBARGOED FOR RELEASE UNTIL 4:00 P.M. ET, WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2026   AAN issues guidance on the use of wearable devices Article examines smart watches, fitness trackers and more for neurological care   Highlights: The AAN has issued new guidance on wearable devices and digital apps as potential tools in neurological care, focusing on non-FDA cleared technology. Wearables can monitor physical activity, sleep, heart rate and other health factors. Some can detect conditions like atrial fibrillation. Others can monitor disease-specific symptoms like seizures and headaches. This guidance for neurologists says the technology has great potential ...

3D-printed robotic rattlesnake triggers an avoidance response in zoo animals, especially species which share their distribution with rattlers in nature Article URL: https://plos.io/4bdJMhx Article title: The multimodal display of rattlesnakes is a deterring signal that works best with sympatric species Author countries: U.S. Funding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work. END ...