A major advancement in sustainable materials science: WPI researchers have engineered a new construction material that not only rivals concrete—it actually captures carbon during production. This breakthrough could change how we build homes, buildings, and infrastructure, offering a new pathway to low-carbon, resilient construction.

Scientists have made a nano breakthrough with a huge potential impact – one that puts printable electronics on the horizon. The scientists have solved a long-standing mystery governing the way layered materials behave, which has yielded a universal, predictive framework for the future of the 2D semiconductor industry.   

Imagine wearable health sensors, smart packaging, flexible displays, or disposable IoT controllers all manufactured like printed newspapers. The same technology could underpin communication circuits, sensors, and signal-processing components made entirely from solution-processed 2D materials.

But until now, finding and developing the 2D materials that could enable such devices was largely trial and error.

For his forward-leaning research into quantum sensing, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Jens Berdahl, a former naval aviator and F/A-18 pilot pursuing his doctorate at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) through the service’s Permanent Military Professor (PMP) program, was presented with the highly competitive Margaret Burbidge Award for Best Experimental Research by a Graduate Student by the American Physical Society, Far West Section. 

Why does plastic turn brittle and paint fade when exposed to the sun for long periods? Scientists have long known that such organic photodegradation occurs due to the sun’s energy generating free radicals: molecules that have lost an electron to sunlight-induced ionization and have been left with an unpaired one, making them very eager to react with other molecules in the environment. However, the exact mechanisms for how and why the energy from the sun’s photons get stored and released in the materials over very long periods have eluded empirical evidence.  

The problem lies in the timeframe. While scientists have access to extremely sophisticated spectroscopy equipment capable of measuring the energy levels of individual electrons at femtosecond to millisecond scales in organic materials, they have paid little attention to time scales beyond seconds – and these are processes that can take years.  

As such, slow, transient charge accumulation has presented a disappointing data gap in both applied and theoretical optics. But now, researchers from the Organic Optoelectronics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have addressed this challenge with a new methodology that detects these faint signals. Their findings are published in Science Advances.

Syntax Bio, a synthetic biology company programming the next generation of cell therapies, today announced the publication of new research in Science Advances detailing the company’s CRISPR-based Cellgorithm™ technology, which lays the groundwork for programmable control of gene activity in human stem cells and offers an alternative to the slow, variable manual processes researchers use today.

In traditional cell differentiation, scientists expose stem cells to a series of growth factors, media changes, and environmental cues over months to coax them into a desired lineage. Each step is highly sensitive to timing and reagent conditions, leading to inconsistent results that are difficult to reproduce or scale. Syntax Bio aims to address this challenge. 

“Our research shows that we can now achieve an unprecedented level of temporal control over how genes turn on inside stem cells,” said Ryan Clarke, PhD, Syntax Bio co-founder, chief technology officer, and study co-author. “It’s the foundation of a new programming language for cells, one that we believe can eventually surpass the slow, inconsistent cell differentiation approaches researchers have relied on for years. Our goal is to make cell programming as reliable and scalable as running software.”

A University of Michigan study examined the informal economy of electronic waste recycling in Ghana.