SAN ANTONIO — February 17, 2026 —Southwest Research Institute’s (SwRI) Metering Research Facility (MRF) has received ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation for natural gas flow calibration, which confirms compliance with international testing and calibration standards. As a result, SwRI is now certified by the American Association for Laboratory Accreditation (A2LA) to offer highly specialized calibration services to a broad range of energy sector clients, including natural gas pipeline operators, flow meter manufacturers and power plants.

Four New York University faculty have been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation: Danique Jeurissen, an assistant professor of neural science, and Marvin Parasram, an assistant professor of chemistry, as well as Florian Schäfer and Joseph Tassarotti, assistant professors in NYU’s Courant Institute School of Mathematics, Computing, and Data Science.

A breakthrough new study from researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities shows how strategic changes in water treatment effectively treated a deadly outbreak of Legionnaires’ Disease.

Chinese chatbots may be censored by the state, according to a study. China has a robust program of censorship and all China-originating LLMs must be approved by the Chinese government before release. Jennifer Pan and Xu Xu compared the responses of foundation LLMs developed in China (BaiChuan, ChatGLM, Ernie Bot, and DeepSeek) to those developed outside of China (Llama2, Llama2-uncensored, GPT3.5, GPT4, and GPT4o) to 145 questions related to Chinese politics. The questions were sourced from events censored by the Chinese government on social media, events covered in Human Rights Watch China reports, and Chinese-language Wikipedia pages that were individually blocked by the Chinese government before the entire site was banned in 2015. Chinese models were significantly and substantially more likely to refuse to respond to questions related to Chinese politics than non-Chinese models. 

A spin-off of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), 60Nd, has secured one of the most significant innovation grants in Europe, the EIC Transition, to bring NeoMag to market, a portable device with technology based on smart magnetic materials. This system enables the study of tumor behavior, traumatic brain injuries and wound healing processes, among other applications, and also supports the development of new drugs.