SAN ANTONIO — June 10, 2026 — SwRI’s James Dante has been named a Fellow of the Association for Materials Protection and Performance (AMPP) in recognition of his outstanding and significant contributions of academic, mentoring, technical, and policy efforts in the field of materials protection and performance. As a Fellow, Dante will serve as an advisor to the AMPP.

A grid cybersecurity and verification framework developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been licensed by GridForge Energy Solutions. The startup plans to explore ways the technology could boost real-time visibility of grid behavior for energy projects, grid management companies and utilities. 

For almost a century, researchers have known that vertical land motion — the lifting and sinking of the ground — affects sea level locally. As the ground sinks, the sea level rises relative to the land. Scientists also assumed this process generally occurred at a steady rate over time. But a research team that includes Thomas Wahl, a UCF researcher and associate professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Construction Engineering, has found that ground subsidence has undergone phases of variable change, creating significant implications for coastal communities.

Researchers from the Institute of Deep-sea Science and Engineering (IDSSE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the University of Pisa, Italy, and the National Institute of Water and Atmosphere Research, New Zealand, have now documented the world’s deepest and largest known aggregation of whale fossils and active whale-fall ecosystems. This deep-sea site, referred to as a “whale necropolis” due to its vast size, is located in the Diamantina Zone of the southeastern Indian Ocean and contains evidence of cetacean falls for at least 5.3 million years.

Conventional cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy, often lack specificity and can damage both cancerous and healthy cells, leading to severe side effects. With this in mind, researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) have developed DNA nanostructures called tetrahedrons and modified them by attaching a Vitamin E-derived molecule called alpha-tocopherol succinate (αT), which can disrupt vital functions inside cancer cells while acting protectively in healthy cells. By incorporating αT into the DNA tetrahedrons, the researchers significantly enhanced cellular uptake and improved anticancer efficacy, resulting in more selective and effective elimination of cancer cells.

The deep sea is a unique ‘evolutionary engine’ with one of the richest and most unexplored sources of genetic diversity on Earth, according to a major new study that has assessed its potential to transform biotechnology and DNA sequencing technologies.