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

Tech & Engineering

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 31-Dec-2025 03:11 ET (31-Dec-2025 08:11 GMT/UTC)

AI advances robot navigation on the International Space Station

Stanford University
Reports and Proceedings

Stanford researchers have become the first to demonstrate that machine-learning control can safely guide a robot aboard the ISS, laying the groundwork for more autonomous space missions.

Meeting: 2025 International Conference on Space Robotics (iSpaRo)

Novel AI technique able to distinguish between progressive brain tumours and radiation necrosis, York University study finds

York University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

While targeted radiation can be an effective treatment for brain tumours, subsequent potential necrosis of the treated areas can be hard to distinguish from the tumours on a standard MRI. A new study led by a York University professor in the Lassonde School of Engineering found that a novel AI-based method is better able to distinguish between the two types of lesions on advanced MRI than the human eye alone, a discovery that could help clinicians more accurately identify and treat the issues.

Journal: International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics
Funder: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Terry Fox Foundation

RSS Research Award for new lidar technology for cloud research

Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS)
Grant and Award Announcement

The Reinhard Süring Foundation's 2025 Research Award goes to Leipzig-based atmospheric researcher Dr. Cristofer Jiménez for his contributions to a remote sensing technology that makes it possible to study the interactions between particles and clouds much better than ever before. The so-called dual-field-of-view polarisation lidar is based on two different aperture angles, which are used to observe and compare the reflections of laser beams in the atmosphere. Every three years, the Reinhard Süring Foundation Research Prize honours young scientists for outstanding work in a subfield of meteorology. In 2025, the prize was awarded for "New techniques, methods and applications of remote sensing of the atmosphere".

Funder: Reinhard Süring Foundation (RSS):

Mount Sinai study finds childhood leukemia aggressiveness depends on timing of genetic mutation

The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team of researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has uncovered why children with the same leukemia-causing gene mutation can have dramatically different outcomes: it depends on when in development the mutation first occurs.

Journal: Cancer Discovery

Intellicule receives NIH grant to develop biomolecular modeling software

Purdue University
Grant and Award Announcement

Intellicule, a software company founded and led by Purdue University researchers, will use an SBIR Phase I grant from the NIH to develop software technology that could impact precision medicine. The Phase I SBIR project aims to expand and advance structural modeling and analysis for drug discovery using cryo-EM by utilizing state-of-the-art deep-learning techniques.

Funder: NIH/National Institutes of Health

Illinois research uncovers harvest and nutrient strategies to boost bioenergy profits

University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Peer-Reviewed Publication

To meet ambitious U.S. Department of Energy targets for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), production of purpose-grown energy crops must ramp up significantly. Although researchers have made substantial progress in understanding the management and conversion of these crops, key knowledge gaps hold the industry back. Now, two new studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign help fill in the blanks for Miscanthus and switchgrass management.

Journal: Biomass and Bioenergy
Funder: Bioenergy Technologies Office, DOE/US Department of Energy

How your brain understands language may be more like AI than we ever imagined

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study reveals that the human brain processes spoken language in a sequence that closely mirrors the layered architecture of advanced AI language models. Using electrocorticography data from participants listening to a narrative, the research shows that deeper AI layers align with later brain responses in key language regions such as Broca’s area. The findings challenge traditional rule-based theories of language comprehension and introduce a publicly available neural dataset that sets a new benchmark for studying how the brain constructs meaning.

Journal: Nature Communications

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