NJIT's Matthew Loges ’25 and Assistant Professor Tomer Weiss explored how the collective behavior of ants — acting like both fluids and elastic materials — can inspire breakthroughs in engineering materials, robotics and traffic control. Their simulation work, recognized at the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH conference, highlights how studying biological swarm dynamics may lead to innovations such as self-healing concrete and smarter multi-agent systems.

In a new study, CU researchers found that honeybees used adaptive strategies to build stable, usable honeycomb on irregular and imperfect surfaces.

Researchers at UC Davis have been awarded a $3 million National Science Foundation grant to develop new technologies and workforce training programs to grow plants in low-resource environments both on Earth and in space. 

Josh Caldwell, professor of mechanical engineering and Director of the Interdisciplinary Materials Science graduate program at Vanderbilt University, and Alex Paarmann of the Fritz Haber Institute, led an international collaborative research project that successfully demonstrated the confinement of terahertz (THz) light to nanoscale dimensions using a new type of layered material. This could lead to improvements in opto-electronic devices such as infrared emitters used in remote controls and night vision and terahertz optics desired for physical security and environmental sensing.