HieraScaffold is an AI framework that could help autonomous-driving and robotics teams create large, dynamic simulation environments with less reliance on costly real-world LiDAR data collection.

Finding better materials to store hydrogen safely and efficiently is key to clean energy, but AI models trained on incomplete data can recommend candidates that don't actually work in practice. An international team led by Tohoku University, drawing on insight from 69 researchers, has proposed a "physics-aware" framework that combines thermodynamic constraints, reproducible data, and real experimental feedback to make AI-guided materials discovery more reliable. The roadmap could help accelerate the search for practical hydrogen storage solutions to support future clean-energy systems.

Stowers Institute for Medical Research Investigator Julia Zeitlinger, Ph.D., and her team partnered with Google DeepMind on AlphaGenome Atlas, a new AI-generated resource released today that predicts the molecular effects of more than 9 billion possible single-letter DNA changes across the human genome. Zeitlinger's lab used the Atlas to map regulatory motifs — the short DNA sequences that help determine which genes are turned on and off — at base-pair resolution across hundreds of cell types, work that would be impractical to do experimentally. The one-petabyte resource is searchable through a web browser without writing code, allowing researchers to prioritize which genetic variants and biological mechanisms to investigate first. Researchers from Google DeepMind, Stowers, Broad Institute, the University of Exeter, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Stanford University contributed scientific input and tested applications of the resource.

Antibiotic resistance is increasingly recognized as a major public health and environmental challenge, yet the risks are not evenly distributed across aquatic environments. A new study published in Biocontaminant finds that river-type drinking water sources generally carry higher risks from antibiotics, antibiotic resistance genes, and resistant bacteria than reservoir-type sources, highlighting the importance of considering water source type when designing monitoring and pollution-control strategies.

Excess nitrogen entering rivers, lakes, and groundwater is a major environmental challenge worldwide. Fertilizers, livestock waste, domestic sewage, atmospheric deposition, and other diffuse sources can all contribute to nitrogen pollution, yet determining exactly where the nitrogen comes from and how it moves through a watershed remains difficult.

The few millimeters of soil surrounding plant roots may be small in scale, but they are among the most biologically and chemically active regions on Earth. In a new review published in Biochar, researchers propose that biochar should be viewed not simply as a soil amendment, but as a “rhizosphere interface engineer” capable of coordinating physical, chemical and biological processes around plant roots.

Northwestern Medicine scientists have developed an AI tool that rapidly and successfully measures colonoscopy quality by reviewing footage of the procedure.

Industry had the floor at Materials and Manufacturing Innovation Days, where more than 350 leaders from industry, government and the research community gathered on Aug. 19-20 at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Discussions focused on barriers slowing the deployment of advanced manufacturing technologies and on how national laboratory capabilities and partnerships could help move those technologies toward production.