On 17 December, in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, representatives from the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and governmental authorities gathered to celebrate the official groundbreaking of the CTAO’s southern site, CTAO-South. After years of successful site preparations, the event marked the beginning of construction on the telescope foundations, paving the way for the first telescopes of the first and largest gamma-ray observatory in the southern hemisphere.

The University of Pittsburgh’s Juan Jose Mendoza Arenas and Pennsylvania State University’s Xiang Yang have received a highly competitive New Initiative Grant from the Charles E. Kaufman Foundation to design algorithms and model turbulence using quantum computers. The collaborative, two-year project titled “Small-Scale Turbulence as a Quantum System” seeks to advance understanding of turbulence and the potential of quantum computers to model complex systems. 

TU Delft develops new method for large-scale health monitoring via wastewater

Wastewater contains a hidden wealth of information about the communities that produce it. During the Covid-19 pandemic, sewage monitoring for viral RNA became a key tool for tracking outbreaks. TU Delft researcher Martin Pabst and his team are now expanding this concept with a new method that enables large-scale monitoring of human health and microbial activity through wastewater.

TAMEST (Texas Academy of Medicine, Engineering, Science and Technology) has announced Maralice Conacci-Sorrell, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Department of Cell Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center, as the recipient of the 2026 Mary Beth Maddox Award and Lectureship in cancer research. She was chosen for her pioneering research revealing how cancer cells harness nutrients to drive their growth and for creating targeted strategies to suppress otherwise untreatable cancers.

AI and plants: Using a new AI method, researchers from the University of Copenhagen have rediscovered 51 old pea varieties that are no longer used in agriculture but may prove promising for the production of plant-based foods. The method is a shortcut to finding new resources in the green treasure troves that gene banks' enormous seed collections represent.

Animal models often fail to capture the complexity of human skin diseases. At TU Wien, scientists are using 3D printing to build living skin models that better reflect human biology and immune responses. A newly published paper shows how these bioprinted tissues can support research into inflammatory skin diseases and the development of new treatments.