SAN ANTONIO — November 17, 2025 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has significantly expanded its heat exchanger performance evaluation capabilities with a new facility designed to industry standards, the Large-Scale Heat Exchanger Test Facility (LS-HXTF) that supports testing up to five megawatts of heat loads as well as a wider range of thermal performance testing.

A research paper by scientists at the City University of Hong Kong proposed a hybrid model-based and online data-driven control method for a tendon-driven continuum robot, which requires no prior dataset collection or training. The method incorporates the Jacobian derived from the piecewise constant curvature model with online Jacobian error compensation using a Kalman filter.

The new research paper, published on Aug. 7 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems, presented an approach eliminates the need for offline dataset collection and training. Experiments conducted on a planar continuum manipulator demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in improving tracking accuracy for both position and attitude. Additionally, the effects of various model parameters are analyzed through comparative experiments.

A new Northwestern Medicine study introduces a first-of-its-kind online calculator that uses percentiles to help younger adults forecast and understand their risk of a heart event over the next 30 years. With rates of obesity, diabetes and hypertension rising among younger Americans, the study authors say identifying long-term risk earlier could help bend the curve on future heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. and worldwide.

A review paper by scientists at Zhejiang University presented a comprehensive review of recent developments in the structural design of single-legged robots and systematically summarizes prevailing modeling approaches and control strategies..

The review paper, published on Aug. 19, 2025 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.

More than 12 million Americans experience visual impairments that limit independence and quality of life. This National Eye Institute grant will fund research on enhancing visual perceptual learning – the brain’s ability to detect subtle visual differences – by leveraging attention mechanisms to generalize improvements across the visual field. Using computational modeling, brain imaging, and neurochemical analysis, the project aims to advance vision rehabilitation, optimize training in visually demanding professions, and inform AI systems that learn and adapt like the human brain.

In a major step forward for cancer care, researchers at ChristianaCare’s Gene Editing Institute have shown that disabling the NRF2 gene with CRISPR technology can reverse chemotherapy resistance in lung cancer. The approach restores drug sensitivity and slows tumor growth. The findings appear today in the journal Molecular Therapy Oncology.