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NSF Funded Research News

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 21-Jun-2026 03:16 ET (21-Jun-2026 07:16 GMT/UTC)

UCLA researchers develop new method to customize artificial tiny organs inside cells

University of California - Los Angeles
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A team of UCLA researchers has developed a new method to build programmable artificial organelles inside living cells using RNA as both the material and the blueprint. The approach enables researchers to design droplet-like cellular compartments that assemble in predictable ways and can be controlled in how and where they form, as well as what molecules they recruit.

Journal: Nature Nanotechnology
Funder: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

In study of Taiwanese electronics firms, effects of offshoring on innovation were mixed

Carnegie Mellon University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

In a new study, researchers explored whether this offshoring degraded or enhanced Taiwanese electronics manufacturing firms’ innovative capabilities. Their results suggest that the practice had mixed outcomes.

Journal: Management Science
Funder: Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Portuguese National Science Foundation

Room-temperature multiferroic could pave way to low-energy computing

Rice University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Rice researchers University engineered a new version of a well-known multiferroic that exhibits orders of magnitude higher performance at room temperature than its parent material.

Journal: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Funder: Army Research Office, Army Research Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, Israel Science Foundation

‘Lab-on-a-drone’ tests remote farm waterways for nitrate levels

Iowa State University

Iowa State researchers have developed a "lab-on-a-drone" that can fly to remote, marshy areas of farm fields and collect real-time measurements of nitrates. The resulting maps of nutrient concentrations could provide "an evaluation critical for both economic and environmental sustainability," according to the researchers.

Journal: ACS Sensors
Funder: National Institute of Food and Agriculture

Superconductivity that shouldn’t exist?

Institute of Science and Technology Austria
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The material UTe₂ exhibits multiple forms of zero electrical resistance—a phenomenon known as superconductivity—and displays several puzzling properties. After UTe₂ loses its superconductivity at a certain magnetic field, it becomes superconducting again under much higher fields. Using a new high-field measurement technique, researchers from the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have explained this unusual superconducting behavior in a paper in Nature Communications. Their method is now being adopted at high‑field laboratories worldwide.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: European Research Council, State of Florida

No brain required: This is how the single-celled stentor learns

University of California - San Francisco
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Scientists have known for more than a century that a single-celled organism with no nerve cells — much less a brain — can behave in ways that resemble learning. But those observations only went so far. How the organism did that was a mystery.

Journal: Current Biology
Funder: European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Commission, EMBO, Fondation Fourmentin-Guilbert

Your P@ssw0rds! no longer have to cause anxiety

Texas A&M University
Peer-Reviewed Publication

An innovative browser extension designed by engineers at Texas A&M University creates a new password for each site visit, on the fly, and without the need to store it anywhere.

Journal: IEEE Internet Computing

Stick-on gel offers new way to treat and monitor plants

University of California - San Diego
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A stick-on gel for plants could offer a simple, safe and targeted way to treat diseases and pests. It can be loaded with substances, such as medicines, and applied directly onto a plant to deliver those materials into its tissues. In tests, the gel was used to clear a plant's bacterial infection.

Journal: Science Advances

Data from Earth's most remote atoll show soil fungi are key to island regeneration

Society for the Protection of Underground Networks
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study in Current Biology suggests that restoration of a rainforest tree on tropical atolls depends upon the right soil fungi being present. The tree species, Pisonia grandis, is the backbone of life on and around atolls: everything from seabirds to the surrounding coral reefs depend on these trees. Research from Palmyra Atoll, the most remote island on Earth, suggests that these extraordinary island ecosystems are dependent upon a specific mycorrhizal fungi that supplies resources to these Pisonia trees.

Journal: Current Biology
Funder: Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, Schmidt Family Foundation, NWO-SPINOZA, NWO-VICI, Knut och Alice Wallenbergs Stiftelse, ERC, Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Fungal Kingdom

With a swipe of a magnet, microscopic “magno-bots” perform complex maneuvers

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Peer-Reviewed Publication

MIT researchers developed a method for making an iron-containing gel that can form soft, magnetically activated structures. The gel could be the basis for microscopic robots and materials that can be controlled by an external magnet, for example to release drugs or grab biopsies within the body.

Journal: Matter
Funder: MathWorks seed grant program

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