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

Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 3-Apr-2026 01:15 ET (3-Apr-2026 05:15 GMT/UTC)

An unexpected breakthrough in flat optics

Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Harvard researchers have found that silica, long thought to lack the right properties for optical metasurfaces, can sometimes outperform standard high-index materials like titanium dioxide.

Journal: Nano Letters

SwRI’s Dr. Michael Davis named SPIE Fellow

Southwest Research Institute
Grant and Award Announcement

SAN ANTONIO — January 14, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) Dr. Michael Davis has been named a Fellow of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

Prenatal and early-life pollution exposures may influence childhood blood pressure patterns, ECHO study finds

Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A child’s blood pressure may be influenced by exposure to air pollution before and shortly after birth, according to a new study from the NIH-funded Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) Program. The study focused on fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO₂), common pollutants from vehicles, power plants, and other industrial sources.

Journal: Environmental Research

Insilico Medicine integrates Nach01 Foundation Model with Microsoft Discovery to enable AI-native, enterprise-ready drug discovery workflows

InSilico Medicine
Business Announcement

Cambridge, Massachusetts, January 14, 2025 - Insilico Medicine (“Insilico”, HKEX:03696), a clinical-stage biotechnology company driven by generative artificial intelligence (AI), today announced the demonstration of its Nach01 multimodal foundation model deployed on Microsoft Discovery, Microsoft’s science-focused platform designed to accelerate research and development through agentic AI. This collaboration highlights Microsoft Discovery’s extensibility with third-party AI models and illustrates how R&D organizations can adopt unified, AI-native workflows for computational drug discovery. By orchestrating secure, multi-step investigations within a Microsoft Azure-native environment, the demonstration underscores key benefits—including enhanced transparency, improved reproducibility, and scalable deployment—empowering scientific teams to streamline and advance discovery processes with great assurance.

Presenting the world's strongest battery in Davos: News tip to the media from Chalmers University of Technology

Chalmers University of Technology
Meeting Announcement

During the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos on 19–23 January 2026, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden participates in Science House – an international meeting place for science, innovation and sustainable societal development. We invite journalists to find out about the latest advanced of the world’s strongest battery, and to interview the researcher who thinks that technologies such as AI isn’t “stealing” human jobs – but something we need to address Europe’s imminent skill shortage.

Physics of foam strangely resembles AI training

University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that foams — from soap suds to food emulsions — are not static, as long assumed, but instead continuously reorganize themselves in ways that mathematically resemble how modern AI systems learn.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Self-healing composite can make airplane, automobile and spacecraft components last for centuries

North Carolina State University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have created a self-healing composite that is tougher than materials currently used in aircraft wings, turbine blades and other applications – and can repair itself more than 1,000 times. The researchers estimate their self-healing strategy can extend the lifetime of conventional fiber-reinforced composite materials by centuries compared to the current decades-long design-life.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Funder: Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program