University of Tennessee, Knoxville Electrical Engineering and Computer Science associate professor Charles Cao leads UT’s role in HARVEST, an NSF AI‑ENGAGE project building AI-powered “digital twins” of farms. Combining drone, sensor, and satellite data, the system runs real-time and “what-if” simulations to reduce pest losses 20–30% and cut water and fertilizer use 20%, while preserving cross-country data privacy.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville researchers led by chemical engineering professor Gila Stein studied nonflammable polymeric ionic liquid (PIL) block copolymers that self-assemble into nanostructures for safer batteries. With ORNL’s Yangyang Wang and funding from UTORII, they showed lamellar “dead-end” defects hinder ion flow, then developed molecular design rules boosting conductivity by an order of magnitude.

When generative AI began writing code with uncanny fluency, it sparked a major question: If a chatbot can build software, do people still need to learn how to code?

Supported by an up to $25 million federal award, a dream team of experts is working to develop the world’s first off-the-shelf engineered liver tissue.

Prof. Charles NG Wang-Wai, Vice-President for Institutional Advancement, CLP Holdings Professor of Sustainability, and Chair Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), has been named the 65th Rankine Lecturer by the British Geotechnical Association (BGA). Widely regarded as one of the most prestigious honors in geotechnical engineering, the Rankine Lecture represents a pinnacle of recognition in the field. Prof. Ng is the first Chinese scholar to be selected since the lecture’s inception in 1961, and the first Asian scholar to receive this honor since Prof. Kenji Ishihara of Japan delivered the lecture in 1993. Previously, he also served as the first Chinese president of the International Society for Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering in the society’s 90-year history. These two distinctions underscore the outstanding contributions and growing influence of Chinese scholars in the global geotechnical engineering community.

When most people think of tree nuts, they imagine a tasty snack — not the parts of the nut that get left behind. But for Houston-based startup Vaulted Deep, a fibrous byproduct from nut agriculture is one ingredient in a bold new approach to waste management. Thanks to a recent collaboration with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL), that vision is one step closer to realization.

At Bigelow Laboratory, we know that the smallest things can have the biggest impact on the ocean ecosystem. A multi-institutional team, led by URI and featuring our researchers, is helping show just how important some of these tiny animals called copepods are for shuttling energy and nutrients across the ocean food web. The team has spent the last several years using advanced laboratory and field methods to understand how the biological communities of the surface and seafloor are connected in the Gulf of Maine and how that relationship — and the larger marine food web — adapts as environmental conditions change. This work is challenging oceanographers' assumptions about how the Gulf of Maine ecosystem works and highlighting the challenges of using historical data to understand our rapidly changing future.

A team of Korean researchers has developed the world’s first technology that can freely connect and disconnect core computing resources such as memory and accelerators with “light” in next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) datacenters. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced the development of a new optical switch based datacenter resource interconnection technology (Optical Disaggregation, OD). This technology is regarded as a core next-generation optical network technology that is designed to resolve the shortage of computing resources due to the increasing AI services and that enables faster and more efficient operation of future datacenters.

Combining data from ancient rocks with computer modelling shows big changes in Earth’s carbon cycle were linked to rising oxygen levels