Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a platform that combines automated wet lab techniques with artificial intelligence (AI) to design nanoparticles for drug delivery. The approach could help researchers deliver difficult-to-encapsulate therapeutics more efficiently and effectively.

Research led by a physicist at the University of California, Riverside, shows how viruses form protective shells, or capsids, around their genomes — a process that, while messy and complex, consistently results in highly symmetrical icosahedral structures. 

MIT researchers developed a more powerful magnetic transistor that could be used to design simpler circuits and create faster and more energy-efficient electronics. 

Martin Wiener, Associate Professor, Psychology, College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHSS), received funding for the study: “CRCNS US-Israel Research Proposal: NSF-BSF: The Perception of Time and Memorability in the Visual Hierarchy.”

How we focus our attention before we even see an object matters. For example, when we look for something moving in the sky, our expectation would be very different if the object is a bird flying past or a baseball coming straight at us. But it’s unclear whether our brain’s attention focuses first on a broad characteristic of the anticipated object, such as movement, or a specific feature — such as the direction of movement up or down. Researchers from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, addressed this by analyzing electrical brain activity with machine-learning methods. 

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s S. Kathleen Lyons, is providing a new framework — Earth system engineering — for examining how organisms, especially humans, have fundamentally altered ecosystems on a global scale. The framework builds on ecosystem engineering, but Earth system engineering is a novel approach that distinguishes between engineering behaviors that have transformed the planet and those that have only local effects.