Brick kilns have long supported construction and economic development, but their legacy can remain in the soil long after production stops. A new study published in Agricultural Ecology and Environment examines how arsenic contamination around a shut-down brick kiln in Anhui Province, China, changes the structure, interactions, and metabolic potential of soil bacterial communities.

Lehigh University researchers have discovered that tiny drug-delivery robots, known as microswimmers, unexpectedly reverse their direction of motion when traveling through complex, non-Newtonian fluids like blood and mucus. Published in Applied Physics Letters, the study provides the first experimental proof of this "backward sliding" phenomenon. This foundational insight into fluid rheology could fundamentally change how biomedical engineers manipulate and control microscale robots for targeted drug delivery inside the human body, turning the surrounding bodily fluids from a navigation obstacle into a mechanism for steering control.

Tuberculosis, caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) is the world’s deadliest single-agent caused infection, responsible for 1.23 million deaths in 2024, according to the World Health Organization. The bacterium’s unique outer cell membrane is notoriously hard to penetrate, making few drugs, including antibiotics, effective in treating the disease.  However, a research team led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has developed a pair of techniques that can vastly speed up the search for better tuberculosis drugs.

With a $4M grant from the National Institutes of Health, a University of Houston pioneer in autoimmune research is launching a 10-year study set to target the very heart of autoimmune disease – examining what causes the body to attack itself and identifying biological pathways that could become targets for new treatments. 

Researchers have found an ingenious way to make soft robots and wearable technology more than three times more powerful by harnessing the surface tension of a tiny liquid metal droplet smaller than a rain droplet.

A review paper by scientists at Capital Medical University provided a comprehensive overview of optoelectronic tweezers used in single-cell research.

The review paper, published on Jun 26, 2026 in the journal Cyborg and Bionic Systems.

Researchers have developed an AI model that predicts job salaries with high accuracy while identifying which skill combinations most significantly impact compensation. Published on 15 May 2026 in Frontiers of Computer Science (co-published by Higher Education Press and Springer Nature), the study addresses a critical challenge in understanding how professional skills interact to determine earnings.

Building on its workforce-development efforts and partnerships with semiconductor manufacturers and community colleges, UT Dallas has been selected to lead key initiatives within the new National Network for Microelectronics Education (NNME) South Regional Node.