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

Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 11-Sep-2025 15:11 ET (11-Sep-2025 19:11 GMT/UTC)

The atmosphere’s growing thirst is making droughts worse, even where it rains

University of California - Santa Barbara
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Hot air holds more moisture. That’s why you can blow your hair dry even after a steamy shower. It’s also what dumps rain in the tropics and sucks water from desert soils.

Journal: Nature

Hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol awareness among US adults

JAMA Network
Peer-Reviewed Publication

About The Study: The proportion of U.S. adults who were unaware of having hypertension increased significantly over the study period (2013 to 2023), particularly in young adults and women, while diabetes and high cholesterol level unawareness remained stable. By the 2021 to 2023 cycle, approximately 1 in 6 adults with hypertension and 3 in 10 with diabetes were unaware of their condition.

Journal: JAMA Cardiology

Many possible futures: How dopamine in the brain might inform AI that adapts quickly to change

Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown
Peer-Reviewed Publication

What if your brain had a built-in map – not of places, but of possible futures? Researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation (CF) blend neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) to reveal that populations of dopamine neurons in the brain don’t just track whether rewards are coming – they encode maps of when those rewards might arrive and how big they might be.

These maps adapt to context and may help explain how we weigh risks, and why some of us act on impulse while others hold back. Strikingly, this biological mechanism mirrors recent advances in AI, and could inspire new ways for machines to predict, evaluate and adapt to uncertain environments more like we do.

Journal: Nature

New 3D printing method enables complex designs and creates less waste

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new way to 3D print complex structures recycles the material used for structural supports, significantly reducing the amount of waste generated.

Journal: Advanced Materials Technologies
Funder: Center for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence, U.S. National Science Foundation, U.S. Office of Naval Research, U.S. Army Research Office

Syntato awarded ARIA funding to advance chromosome engineering in crops

Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Medical Sciences
Grant and Award Announcement

Syntato, a new spinout emerging from the MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences (LMS), announces securing funding from the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA). The contract with ARIA will facilitate Syntato’s pioneering work in the field of deep crop re-engineering, focusing on creating a potato variety with a novel chromosome by the summer of 2028.

Funder: ARIA

UH research challenges conventional theories of how cells detect electrical fields

University of Houston
Grant and Award Announcement

New evidence from the University of Houston suggests that cells are incredibly sensitive to electrical fields, much more so than older scientific theories suggest, challenging assumptions about the limits of cellular electrical sensing and explains how cells detect electric fields with remarkable sensitivity.

PolyU scholar honored with the Hong Kong Engineering Science and Technology Award for contributions to Web3 and digital economy

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Grant and Award Announcement

Scholars from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) are committed to pioneering research excellence and providing innovative solutions to the ever-changing needs of society and technology. Prof. AU Man Ho Allen, Professor and Associate Head (Research and Development) of the Department of Computing at PolyU, has been recognised with the prestigious Hong Kong Engineering Science and Technology (HKEST) Award 2024-25 for his outstanding contributions to the Web3 ecosystem and the digital economy.