What do honey bees and electric power grids have in common? More than you might think, according to Wangda Zuo, professor of architectural engineering at Penn State. Zuo is leading a new project funded by a $1 million award from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to investigate how coordinating and controlling distributed energy resources — similar to how honey bees regulate their colony’s resources — may help improve the distribution resiliency of electric grids.  

Researchers from the University of South Florida have used artificial intelligence and citizen science to identify what may be the first specimen of Anopheles stephensi — an invasive and deadly malaria-carrying mosquito — ever detected in Madagascar.

Xuanhong Cheng, a professor of bioengineering and materials science and engineering at Lehigh University, and her team are collaborating with materials science company Dow Inc. to study how microbes—microscopic organisms that digest sewage—interact with and potentially biodegrade viscosifiers, polymers used in consumer products like shampoos, detergents, and cosmetics to keep ingredients suspended and stable in solution. Their proposal recently received a three-year GOALI award from the National Science Foundation. The program funds projects that support university-industry collaborations.

Computer programming powers modern society and enabled the AI revolution but little is known about how our brains learn this essential skill. To help answer that question, Johns Hopkins University researchers studied the brain activity of university students before and after they learned how to code.

A new dataset of pre- and post-hurricane first-floor elevation for homes and buildings in a Southwest Florida city was awarded a 2025 DesignSafe Dataset Award, which recognized the dataset's diverse contributions to natural hazards research.