Ines Ibañez-Tallon is revealing how an understudied region of the brain plays an outsized role in opioid and nicotine dependence. 

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Volkswagen Group of America have a longstanding partnership focused on innovation in mobility. Since 2020, their collaboration at the UT Research Park has produced over 30 research projects, 30 publications, and 12 pending patents. Together, they develop lighter vehicles, longer-lasting batteries, and sustainable materials.

In celebration of the Hubble Space Telescope’s 35 years in Earth orbit, NASA is releasing an assortment of compelling images recently taken by Hubble, stretching from the planet Mars to star-forming regions, and a neighboring galaxy.

Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have spent the last three years developing an ultra-low-power chemical sensor to detect sarin and other chemical warfare agents or gaseous industrial toxins, aiming to protect the public and warfighters.

An expert on how societies prepare for and respond to emergencies — from pandemics to climate change — USC’s Andrew Lakoff explores how our well-being depends on the health of Earth’s ecosystems.

Boone discusses how his approach to sustainability — rooted in understanding interconnected systems — guides his work in addressing the complex environmental and social challenges facing our planet.

Sandia National Laboratories serves a unique role in the nuclear security enterprise: lead systems integrator for the nuclear weapons program.

The BMD project, launched in March 2025, will develop a Single Access Point (SAP) as a centralised platform to monitor and drive evidence-based biodiversity conservation across Europe. The SAP will give policymakers and Natura 2000 managers easy access to high-throughput biodiversity monitoring tools with AI species identification services, enabling faster, more accurate and more frequent data collection over larger areas and longer timeframes. It will also unlock historical baseline biodiversity data that is currently scattered, hard to find, or known only to experts. With online projection tools that are co-designed with the stakeholder communities, the SAP will help assess species conservation status, track biodiversity trends, and predict the impact of changes on land, in freshwater, and at sea—from local landscapes to larger scales. These insights will directly support the planning, management, and expansion of protected areas, while also improving conservation strategies by forecasting the effects of future land cover and climate change.

Earth Day 2025: Shermin de Silva, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, researches the ecology, social dynamics and communication of elephants. In this Q&A, de Silva provides an inside look at her new book on elephant behavior and conservation, along with insights on how to protect their future.

Wildfires tore through Los Angeles in January 2025, burning more than 16,000 structures, uprooting neighborhoods and displacing entire communities. As the infernos raged, DRI scientists with a wide range of expertise in soil science, air quality, and post-wildfire impacts put together a plan for collecting ash, dust, soil, and building material samples from the burn zones. To them, these urban fires presented a unique opportunity to understand how materials like plastics, metals, and even lithium batteries from electric cars can transform into environmental contaminants when they burn.