EurekAlert! News by Subject: Tech & Engineering - News by Subject: Tech & Engineering

Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 1-Jan-2026 17:12 ET (1-Jan-2026 22:12 GMT/UTC)

1-Dec-2025

Developing a new electric vehicle sound

Acoustical Society of America
Reports and Proceedings

Automakers are required to design their vehicles so they emit sounds at low speeds to alert pedestrians to their presence, and researchers can design custom sounds to maximize their effectiveness. Mei Suzuki and her team’s efforts created a library of sounds and played them to volunteers, both in a studio and in real road conditions. They then asked the volunteers to rate each and found the best performer was a version of pink noise — a type of noise dominated by lower-frequency notes.

Meeting: Sixth Joint Meeting

1-Dec-2025

Everyday repellent, global pollutant

Biochar Editorial Office, Shenyang Agricultural University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

N,N-diethyl-m-toluamide, better known as DEET, is one of the world’s most widely used insect repellents – and it is now turning up in rivers, lakes, groundwater and even drinking water around the globe, according to a new review by an international research team. The authors warn that while DEET helps protect millions of people from mosquito-borne diseases, its growing footprint in aquatic environments raises questions about long‑term ecological and health risks.

1-Dec-2025

What time is it on Mars? NIST physicists have the answer

National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Time moves differently on Mars. NIST physicts recently calculated exactly how fast each second passes on Mars. And if humans want to explore the solar system, every microsecond counts.

Journal: The Astronomical Journal

1-Dec-2025

Small changes make some AI systems more brain-like than others

Johns Hopkins University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Some visual AI systems can simulate human brain activity before ever being trained on any data. After small tweaks to the architecture, some untrained convolutional neural networks better simulated activity patterns in the human brain and rivaled trained conventional AI systems, which generally are exposed to millions to billions of images during training.

Journal: Nature Machine Intelligence

1-Dec-2025

Francisco José Sánchez-Sesma selected as 2026 Joyner Lecturer

Seismological Society of America
Grant and Award Announcement

SSA and the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute (EERI) are pleased to announce that Francisco José Sánchez-Sesma, professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM), is the 2026 recipient of the William B. Joyner Lecture Award.

1-Dec-2025

Concordia researchers develop novel approach to help Large Language Models learn from speech

Concordia University
Reports and Proceedings

Concordia University researchers unveiled a new audio-tokenization method, FocalCodec, that compresses speech into compact tokens while preserving meaning and quality. Concordia University

By using binary spherical quantization and focal modulation, FocalCodec dramatically reduces bitrate — making speech easier for large language models to process. Concordia University

In listening tests with 33 participants, reconstructed speech was judged nearly indistinguishable from original recordings, showing the new method keeps natural sound.

Meeting: Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025)

1-Dec-2025

Three-quarters of the world not getting enough omega-3, research shows

University of East Anglia
Peer-Reviewed Publication

New research shows that three-quarters of the world are not getting enough omega-3. A new study finds that 76 per cent of people worldwide are not meeting recommended intakes of EPA and DHA, revealing a significant global public health gap.

The research is the first global review of national and international omega-3 intake recommendations across all life stages for generally healthy people.

Journal: Nutrition Research Reviews