Rice’s Naomi Halas, Peter Nordlander and Hossein Robajatzi have been awarded the 2026 Hill Prize in Engineering for their work advancing light-driven technologies for sustainable ammonia synthesis.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences has gone in this eighteenth edition to physicists Allan MacDonald (The University of Texas at Austin) and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT) for their discoveries concerning the “magic angle” that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled. What the committee terms the “pioneering” insights of the two researchers have provided both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a whole new field, now known as twistronics, where superconductivity, magnetism and other target properties can be obtained by rotating new materials such as graphene.

Protein scientists could improve reproducibility and coordination across the field by adopting a small, shared set of “model proteins,” according to a new Perspective by Connecticut College chemist Marc Zimmer. Published in the 40th-anniversary issue of Protein Engineering, Design and Selection, the article proposes pairing widely used reference proteins with shared benchmarks, curated datasets and minimal reporting standards. Zimmer argues that the approach mirrors the success of model organisms and is especially timely as artificial intelligence accelerates protein design, increasing the need for comparable and reusable data.

The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS, President Lee Ho Seong) has developed a key materials technology that accelerates the commercialization of all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs)—next-generation batteries designed to intrinsically eliminate the risks of fire and explosion. 

The Emerging Material Metrology Group at KRISS demonstrated ultra-dense, large-area solid electrolyte membranes by applying a method that coats solid electrolyte powders with multifunctional compounds, reducing production costs to one-tenth of conventional levels.