Imagine a car seat that reshapes itself around the person sitting in it, clothing that gently assists someone as they walk or a soft safety system that can sense an impending impact and respond. At Rice University, mechanical engineer Vanessa Sanchez is working toward a future in which those functions could be built directly into fabric. Sanchez, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has received the Toyota Programmable System Innovation Fellowship to develop “Programmable 3D-Knitted Soft Robotic Textiles for Human-Centered Mobility.” The project will explore how sensing, movement and mechanical behavior can be programmed directly into knitted structures rather than added later as separate components.

Researchers designed an AI-driven system that could boost the safety and speed of minimally invasive surgical procedures by rapidly matching X-rays captured during surgery with a patient’s preoperative 3D medical scan.

With the increasingly urgent demand for non-toxic, high-specific-impulse propellants in space propulsion systems, ammonium dinitramide (ADN)-based liquid propellants have attracted extensive attention as a new-generation green alternative to hydrazine-based fuels. However, existing ADN-based thrusters all adopt the catalytic ignition technology route, which suffers from inherent drawbacks: the catalyst cannot withstand temperatures exceeding 1500 K, long preheating times are required prior to startup (in the Prisma mission, in-flight preheating lasted 600–720 s with a single-event energy consumption of 25 kJ), and insufficient preheating may lead to "hard start" or even explosion—these issues severely constrain the rapid response capability and operational safety of the thrusters. Although active ignition methods such as resistive ignition and laser ignition have been validated at the single-droplet level, how to achieve catalyst-free electric ignition at the thruster system level and systematically evaluate its combustion characteristics remains a critical engineering problem urgently to be addressed in the field of green space propulsion.