Shaun Gleason, director of the Partnerships Office at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been appointed to Tennessee’s Artificial Intelligence Advisory Council. Council members are appointed by the governor and provide a collaborative source of knowledge, expertise and information sharing to advance the state’s use of AI technologies.

445 million years ago, life on our planet was forever changed. During a geological blink of an eye, glaciers formed over the supercontinent Gondwana, drying out many of the vast, shallow seas like a sponge and giving us an ‘icehouse climate’ that, together with radically changed ocean chemistry, ultimately caused the extinction of about 85% of all marine species – the majority of life on Earth.

In a new Science Advances study, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have now proved that from this biological havoc, known as the Late Ordovician Mass Extinction (LOME), came an unprecedented richness of vertebrate life. During the upheaval, one group came to dominate all others, putting life on the path to what we know it as today: jawed vertebrates.

Using a tiny, acid-tolerant yeast, scientists have demonstrated a cost-effective way to make disposable diapers, microplastics, and acrylic paint more sustainable through biomanufacturing. Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Penn State University developed a bio-based method to produce 3-Hydroxypropanoic acid (3-HP), a precursor chemical for the acrylic acid used in those products, and validated its commercial potential for this lucrative market. The scientists are all part of the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Research Center.

New research published in Science introduces a promising solid electrolyte material that could improve the performance of next-generation lithium batteries, particularly at lower temperatures. Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech) Research Professor of Chemistry James Kaduk, who co-authored the paper, contributed a key finding to the research: identifying where lithium atoms reside within the crystalline structure.