SAN ANTONIO — September 21, 2026 — Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) is ready to serve as a “teaming partner” for a U.S. Department of Energy Alternative Fuels and Feedstocks Office program. The Accelerating Scale-up and Pre-piloting of Emerging Chemical Technologies (ASPECT) program will provide up to $58 million for bench-scale and pre-pilot scale projects to enhance domestic supply chains and reduce America’s dependence on chemical imports. Through ASPECT, selected organizations can match with SwRI to advance their alternative or waste feedstock projects.

Researchers built more energy-efficient and high-performance phase change random access memory by learning how to sculpt heat within a nanometer-thin sandwich of materials. They engineered a "double-confined" structure that stacks alternating slices of antimony telluride (Sb₂Te₃) with two distinct helper compounds: highly conductive nickel ditelluride (NiTe₂) and heat-blocking molybdenum ditelluride (MoTe₂).

Three faculty members in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville Tickle College of Engineering are co-principal investigators (co-PIs) on research projects funded by the Department of Energy’s new Genesis Mission, a $5 billion program to create a national ecosystem of AI tools and services that will help researchers address pressing energy, scientific, and engineering challenges.

Los Angeles, CA – September 21, 2026 - Dr. Johnson V. John, Assistant Professor at the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation, has been awarded an NIH R01 grant to lead development of a next-generation, immunomodulatory wound dressing platform designed to accelerate healing in chronic wounds.

As artificial intelligence moves beyond controlled settings and into dynamic, uncertain and socially complex environments, new questions arise about how these systems understand their surroundings, act autonomously, and interact with people. Rather than concentrating intelligence in a single complex system, the four-year EIC Pathfinder project EMERGE took a different approach. It considered the simplest possible artificial agents, such as small robots in a swarm, components of a robotic body, or connected devices. Individually, each unit may possess limited intelligence and information. Together, however, from their interactions, sharing information and coordinating their behaviour, they can establish a representation of shared existence, environment and goals, which the project calls collaborative awareness.

Graph neural networks have been used in various graph-related tasks, where they have achieved excellent performance. However, incomplete graph structures, commonly found in real-life scenarios, can severely degrade performance. In a new study, researchers develop a novel graph completion network that reconstructs missing features and structure simultaneously while also maintaining performance with extremely weak supervision, which is difficult to achieve with conventional models.