Food waste recycling is a growing priority for cities seeking to cut landfill use and build a circular bioeconomy. Anaerobic digestion can turn food waste into renewable energy, but it also leaves behind a wet, nutrient-rich residue known as food waste digestate. Composting this digestate can return nutrients to soil, yet the process often loses valuable nitrogen as ammonia and nitrous oxide, reducing compost quality and contributing to air pollution and climate change.

Rice is a staple food for more than half of the world’s population, but in some mining-impacted regions, paddy soils can contain elevated levels of arsenic and antimony. These toxic metalloids can move from soil into rice plants, raising concerns for food safety and human health. A new study published in Biochar reports a promising strategy: a magnetic silicon-enriched biochar gel that can immobilize both arsenic and antimony in contaminated paddy soil and reduce their accumulation in rice grains.

A new study has shown that spent coffee grounds, one of the world’s most familiar daily wastes, can be transformed into a high performance, biodegradable thermal insulation material with potential applications in buildings, packaging, transportation, and solar energy systems.

A research team led by Professor Nenad Miljkovic in The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has published a breakthrough study in Nature Physics. The work reports the first experimental discovery of a previously unknown frost propagation mechanism—a “suspended ice bridge”—offering new pathways for anti-frosting surface design.

SAN ANTONIO—June 2, 2026—Dustin T. Osborne, a staff engineer in the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) Powertrain Engineering Division, was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).