The third annual Cleveland Discovery and Innovation Forum, hosted by Cleveland Clinic and IBM, highlighted progress in applying quantum computing and AI to healthcare and life sciences research. The forum brought together global leaders in healthcare, science and technology to share insights into how advanced computing is accelerating discovery and shaping the future of patient care.

The one-day event, held today on Cleveland Clinic’s Main Campus, featured more than 30 speakers from academia, industry, foundations, venture capital and government.

A new study finds that plants respond to injury by actively redirecting sugars to damaged tissues, helping fuel the regeneration process. Using a fluorescent sensor to track sugar movement in living plants, researchers discovered that wounds trigger a localized shift in energy transport, concentrating glucose around the injury site. The findings offer new insight into how plants coordinate repair and recovery and could help scientists better understand the mechanisms that support resilience in crops facing physical damage or environmental stress.

A new study involving UCF researcher and Associate Professor Thomas Wahl has found that historical one-in-100-year extreme coastal water level events are now occurring about every eight years.

NIMS succeeded in developing a technique to form a GaN epitaxial film with extremely low resistance and robust thermal stability, which is essential for realizing vertical gallium nitride (GaN) devices on low-cost silicon (Si) wafers. This novel technique, an “amorphous-like interlayer (AL-IL)” approach, uses an ultrathin film composed of Si and nitrogen (N) to accommodate lattice mismatch between Si and GaN, and enables vertical current flow between the substrate and the GaN film. This achievement constitutes a fundamental technology for fabricating vertical GaN devices on Si wafers, and is expected to contribute to reducing the cost of high-efficiency power devices and micro-LED devices in the future. This research result was published in Advanced Physics Research on May 29, 2026.

Sonar-MASt3R is a new underwater mapping technique developed at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) that may allow vehicles to see through murky, low-visibility waters.

Every year, hundreds of millions of tonnes of petrochemical-based plastics are produced, much of which ends up in the environment or is incinerated. This exacerbates greenhouse gas emissions and the environmental crisis caused by plastic pollution. Now, a study led by the University of Barcelona has produced a biodegradable bioplastic of high industrial value — polyhydroxybutyrate or PHB — from unprocessed potato starch in a single 24-hour step, a strategic breakthrough that could help reduce dependence on oil and the volume of persistent plastic waste.