SAN ANTONIO — July 20, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has expanded the capabilities of its High Energy Annex Test (HEAT) facility to advance hypersonic and supersonic technology. The SwRI HEAT Facility, which was created in 2016 to support gas turbine combustor testing, can now simulate the extreme conditions experienced at hypersonic speeds. These upgrades make it possible for SwRI to test hypersonic systems technologies, such as scramjets, ramjets, small gas turbines, and rocket thrusters in a controlled environment. The work supports a project that seeks to address a critical gap in hypersonic vehicle development.

RMIT researchers and international collaborators have demonstrated a new way to significantly increase green hydrogen production using low‑cost materials, offering a potential pathway to cheaper clean fuel.

Green hydrogen is expected to play a major role in cutting emissions from industries such as shipping, steelmaking and aviation. But producing it efficiently remains a major hurdle.

By improving a widely used compound, titanium dioxide, the team reported hydrogen production more than 80 times higher than the commercial untreated version under the same test conditions.

Dubbed PATTY, the tool corrects hidden bias in a widely used genomics method, helping scientists distinguish true biological discoveries from false leads.

 

Your intestine completely rebuilds its inner lining every few days—one of the fastest renewal processes in the human body. Scientists have now discovered that this extraordinary feat is accompanied by a hidden network of specialized mesenchymal support cells working behind the scenes, revealing an unexpected level of organization inside the gut and offering new clues that may eventually inform approaches to intestinal injury and inflammatory bowel disease.

Silicon photonics has emerged as a promising technology for addressing bandwidth and latency bottlenecks of conventional electrical interconnects and therefore are being explored for future artificial intelligence infrastructure. However, heterogenous integration of multiple material systems remains a challenge. Now, researchers show how micro-transfer printing can enable highly versatile heterogenous integration to expand the functionality of silicon photonics, paving the way for advanced photonic systems.

Researchers analyzed snow droughts in Xinjiang from 1980 to 2021 and classified them into warm-only, dry-only, and warm-dry types. The study identifies strong spatial heterogeneity, highlights the Kunlun Mountains as a major hotspot, and shows that warm-dry snow droughts increased markedly after 2000.