Researchers with the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering’s Resilient Infrastructure and Disaster Response (RIDER) Center are investigating better ways to predict where road-clogging debris will be most severe after tropical cyclones. Their latest paper was published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction.

The transgenic papaya “SunUp” was developed in the 1990s and was widely publicized because of its ability to resist the papaya ringspot virus. A new study has now identified the genomic changes involved and how they influence the transgenic plants.

Elham Azizi, Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cancer Data Research in the Irving Institute for Cancer Dynamics and department of biomedical engineering, has won a National Science Foundation CAREER award to study interactions between cells inside and around breast cancer tumors to better understand how aggressive tumors evade the body’s immune defenses. The $500,030 grant will support her project, “Integrative modeling of intercellular interactions in the tumor microenvironment,” focused on developing new computational methods to analyze the interactions between immune cells and breast cancer.

The Event Horizon Telescope shared the first image of Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The view past the clouds of gas and dust — confirmed with the help of the Frontera supercomputer at The University of Texas at Austin — revealed a black hole that is hot, dense, and quickly changing, with a ring of superheated gas around its dark center. The EHT team’s results were published today in a special issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

A study led by University of Utah researchers, with an international team of collaborators, finds that tree growth does not seem to be generally limited by photosynthesis but rather by cell growth. This suggests that we need to rethink the way we forecast forest growth in a changing climate, and that forests in the future may not be able to absorb as much carbon from the atmosphere as we thought.

A new National Science Foundation (NSF) initiative has awarded three teams of researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering a combined $2.5 million to confront these challenges head on. Participating in the projects, which are supported by NSF’s Resilient and Intelligent Next Generation Systems (RINGS) partnership, are Elza Erkip, Siddharth Garg, Zhong-Ping Jiang, Farshad Khorrami, Ramesh Karri, Yong Liu, Pei Liu, Shiv Panwar, and Sundeep Rangan. All are professors of electrical and computer engineering, with affiliations at NYU WIRELESS, NYU Center for Cybersecurity, and the Center for Advanced Technology in Telecommunications (CATT).

Jundong Li, University of Virginia assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, computer science and data science, has earned a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award to better understand cause and effect in human decision-making in the era of big data. Li will use his $600,000 five-year award to develop a suite of sophisticated algorithms and mathematical models, informed by human experience and intuition, to find cause-and-effect relationships in a huge amount of data. His work has the potential for broad applications in public health and medicine and education.

New research from the Stowers Institute for Medical Research examines how cavefish, surface-dwelling river fish that flooded into underground cave systems over 100,000 years ago, developed unique metabolic adaptations to survive in nutrient-scarce environments. The study created a genome-wide map of liver tissue for two independent colonies of cavefish along with river fish to understand how cavefish metabolism evolved and how this may be applicable for humans.

Surprising new understanding of the complexities of global food trade and the impacts of biodiversity hotspots.

A new study shows that the optic gland in maternal octopuses undergoes a massive shift in cholesterol metabolism, resulting in dramatic changes in the steroid hormones produced. Alterations in cholesterol metabolism in other animals, including humans, can have serious consequences on longevity and behavior, and the study’s authors believe this reveals important similarities in the functions of these steroids across the animal kingdom, in soft-bodied cephalopods and vertebrates alike.