Research & Development World

Neutrinos, discovered in 1956, are small, fundamental particles that can pass through objects without interacting with matter. The particles interact only through gravity and the weak nuclear force, meaning they can pass through massive objects with an extremely small chance of interacting with any atoms. Neutrinos are little understood, despite being the most abundant particle…

By Angela Lawrence, Senior Director, Real World Evidence, Symphony Health, an ICON plc company The healthcare industry sits at the center of the world’s data explosion. Nearly 30% of all global data originates from healthcare, with the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of healthcare data expected to reach 36% in 2025. For life sciences companies,…

In Norway, scientists are using drones to detect a virus in humpback whales called cetacean morbillivirus. The drones are used to collect samples from whale blow, which the scientists then test for four different viruses. They published their findings last month in BMC Veterinary Research, showing that cetacean morbillivirus is circulating in northern ecosystems.  The…

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford University say they have built a two-photon lithography system that could push 3D nanofabrication toward manufacturing scale, boosting throughput by more than 1,000 times compared with commercial tools while maintaining minimum feature sizes of 113 nanometers. Two-photon lithography uses ultrafast laser pulses to harden material only at…

Researchers at Chonnam National University in South Korea have engineered an enzyme cascade that converts formaldehyde into L-glyceraldehyde, a chiral compound used as a building block in pharmaceutical synthesis and in routes to specialty sugars. The one-pot process runs in water under mild conditions and reached roughly 94% conversion efficiency, pointing to a potential approach…

DuPont Water Solutions’ FilmTec Fortilife XC160 membrane, a 2025 R&D 100 Award winner in the Mechanical/Materials category, tackles a challenge traditional reverse osmosis can’t: concentrating wastewater streams up to 16% salt. At that salinity, osmotic pressure overwhelms conventional membranes, but the XC160’s underlying technology, developed over a decade and refined while awaiting scale-up, handles it.…

Rare earths are everywhere in the news. The technology to turn them into usable alloys? That’s been stuck in the 19th century: energy-intensive, emissions-heavy and dependent on hazardous fluoride salts. Gadolyn’s D-DIRECT platform takes a different approach: single-pass oxide reduction, no carbon-based reductants, water as the byproduct. The 2025 R&D 100 Award recognizes what that…

ChatGPT said: CEA-Leti announced it has built working 2.5-volt silicon-on-insulator CMOS chips at just 400°C. That is low enough to stack them atop finished circuitry without risking damage to the layers below, a hurdle that has long stalled progress toward denser, more efficient 3D chip designs. The French research institute, leading the EU’s FAMES pilot…

The philanthropic organization Schmidt Sciences announced its investment in an orbiting observatory larger than NASA’s Hubble telescope and three ground-based observatories at the American Astronomical Society’s annual winter meeting Wednesday. The observatory would be the first full-scale privately funded observatory in space, according to Schmidt Sciences President Stuart Feldman. The project aims to have all…