Research & Development World

Even on the largest supercomputers, simulations that explicitly resolve every blood cell can only cover a small volume. On Summit, Oak Ridge National Labs’ supercomputer, cell-resolved simulations topped out at roughly a three-millimeter cube. Exascale machines like Aurora and Frontier have pushed that to about a one-centimeter cube with several billion cells, up from around 500 million, said Amanda Randles of Duke…

By Bill Holt, DO, Vice President, Neuroscience Therapeutic Area, ICON For neurologic monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), the scientific hurdle is no longer the primary barrier to success. Increasingly, operational execution—not efficacy—determines whether these therapies reach patients at scale. From multiple sclerosis (MS) to neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD) to early Alzheimer’s disease, mAbs have moved from…

German biophysicists Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel and Stanford psychiatrist and bioengineer Karl Deisseroth won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in optogenetics, a technique to control neurons with light, the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet announced today. Thomas Perlmann, the Nobel Assembly’s secretary-general, pointed to vision restoration as an…

Researchers have developed molecular quantum nanosensors (MoQNs) designed to operate in the cytoplasm and nuclei of living cancer cells to map radical-generation processes and thermal dynamics that are linked to cancer-associated cellular physiology.  The sensors use molecular-level uniformity to achieve a threefold enhancement in spectral resolution and superior thermometric specificity. The platform enables absolute temperature…

Idaho National Laboratory (INL) is collaborating with Argonne, Oak Ridge and Sandia National Laboratories, as well as four universities and more than 20 industry partners, on a three-year project to bring agentic AI to nuclear engineering. The principal investigator said the project, called Prometheus, will aim to compress the time to get a nuclear power…

M. Parans Paranthaman, Ph.D., a Corporate Fellow and UT-Battelle Distinguished Inventor in the Chemical Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), has built a career around carrying research to a working technology. Since joining ORNL in 1993, he has helped develop superconducting wire technologies, battery materials and methods for recovering lithium from oilfield wastewater.…

A team of researchers at the Dalian University of Technology in China designed and 3D-printed a spacecraft shield consisting of arrays of hollow, water-filled aluminum eggshells between two plates, reporting that it slowed projectiles by as much as 65% in simulations. Whether the design will hold up against real projectiles remains to be seen. The…

The ChatGPT-maker OpenAI will license Synopsys’ chip design software to develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized AI model the companies plan to sell through a service bundling computing, model access and software licenses. The partnership centers on pairing OpenAI’s frontier AI models with Synopsys’ Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software. The multiyear agreement announced Sept. 30, alongside Synopsys’…

The Technology Innovation Institute (TII) calls its new probe “asteroid-landing,” but its engineers don’t expect it to survive hitting 269 Justitia, a 58-km-wide asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter that the United Arab Emirates’ newly announced mission will study. Anton Ivanov, executive director of TII’s Propulsion and Space Research Center, said the…