Research & Development World

Blistering summer heat. Data center power demand that is potentially set to double from 2025 to 2027. An uptick in wildfires. The U.S. power grid is at an inflection point, but there is also a significant effort to reshape the grid. “In this era we’re in now, we’re seeing more investment in the grid than… The post Inside S&C Electric’s and Argonne National Lab’s CRADA partnership appeared first o…

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is partnering with Oxylus, a Yale spinout focused on CO2 electrolysis technology, to develop and, potentially, commercialize a reactor that could convert carbon waste to methanol without alkali cations. LLNL won $2 million from the DOE’s Industrial Technologies Office through the Technology Commercialization Fund with the aim of advancing the technolo…

No one knows for sure when quantum computers will be able to crack widely used public-key encryption methods, but the anxieties are on the rise that the threshold may be in the relatively near term. The probability of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is in the ballpark of 28% to 49% within 10 years and… The post EigenQ CEO: Quantum risk puts everything from pharma data and government…

Delivering laboratory buildings within tight budgets remains a challenge, particularly for developer-led projects where cost certainty is critical. Early planning decisions shape upfront costs and long-term adaptability. Establishing parameters early helps control capital investment without limiting future usability. Integrating cost estimation consultants, construction managers, and general cont…

A team of researchers from the U.S. and South Korea have developed a potentially more sustainable way to refine crude oil, reducing the energy needed for the process by 31.6% in process simulations. The team published their findings in Nature. The scientists investigated the use of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) membranes, which are commonly used as a non-selective… The post New process could reduce ene…

An international team of researchers developed a method to convert the carbon dioxide emitted from factories into fuel feedstock without cleaning or purifying the gas. Traditionally, carbon capture requires costly, energy-intensive purification steps. A paper published in Science estimates that separating carbon dioxide from coal flue gas and compressing it to 150 bar requires at least 0.11 megaw…

The winners in the 2026 R&D 100 Awards Special Recognition categories have been announced by R&D World. The honorees were selected by an esteemed judging panel including over 50 well-respected industry professionals from across the world. These and other winners will be celebrated at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet in Scottsdale, Arizona on November 19th.  2026… The post Winners unveiled for 2026 R&D …

R&D World has announced the winners of the 2026 R&D 100 Professional Awards. The list of 2026 winners follows, along with highlights from their nomination letters. These winners will be formally awarded at the R&D 100 Awards Banquet at the Hyatt Scottsdale, AZ on November 19, 2025. R&D Leader of the Year Kumar Sanketh, R&D… The post R&D World announces 2026 R&D 100 Professional Award Winners appe…

Investors have set their sights high for Anthropic, with some eyeing a valuation of $2 trillion or even $3 trillion. While the figures comes from investor models rather than a valuation target set by Anthropic, according to the Financial Times and CNBC, Anthropic could rival SpaceX’s record IPO, which raised $75 billion at an initial… The post Anthropic backers eye $2 trillion valuation. Its proj…

The Human-Occupied Vehicle (HOV) Alvin is returning to the ocean, now with an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) that could enable scientists to explore deep-sea trenches.   The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) announced that the U.S. Navy’s Director of Submarine Programs (DSP) has certified the human-occupied submersible Alvin to return to service after its overhaul and testing progr…

Enterprise software in drug development tends to arrive slowly. Laboratory information management systems, quality platforms and the enterprise resource planning software they connect to typically take months to deploy. In Panorama Consulting Group’s 2026 ERP report, based on 170 organizations across industries surveyed between January 2025 and January 2026, the median project ran nine months,… T…

Kumar Sanketh, R&D director of Functional Polymers product R&D within Packaging, Specialty Plastics and Hydrocarbons at Dow Inc., is the 2026 R&D 100 Leader of the Year. Sanketh leads a global product R&D organization of more than 110 employees at six sites across the Americas, Europe and China. Sanketh leads a global product R&D organization… The post R&D World announces 2026 R&D 100 Leader of t…

Researchers at Binghamton University are using computer vision and machine-learning to detect landmines from aerial images. Their results reveal the importance of out-of-sample (OOS) testing, which evaluates a model on independently collected images beyond the dataset used to train and tune it.  “It’s easy to get numbers in the 80 or 90 percent range if you’re not doing out-of-sample testing,” sa…

M. Parans Paranthaman, distinguished corporate fellow in the Chemical Sciences Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is the 2026 R&D 100 Researcher of the Year. Paranthaman joined ORNL in 1993 and has worked across materials chemistry, energy storage, high-temperature superconductors, permanent magnets, critical-material recovery and advanced manufacturing. He also holds a joint appointment …

Medical Design & Outsourcing‘s Min-Vasive Medtech webinar series runs August 18–20, with one-on-one interviews on medical device engineering and R&D strategy. The sessions are built for device developers, though the topics on the agenda cut across disciplines, including remote robotic ultrasound, multi-arm surgical robots and resorbable artificial grafts. The free, three-day series pairs Arrowfly…

Cody Somers, lead technician at Kennametal, Inc., is the 2026 R&D 100 Technician of the Year. Having worked at the industrial technology and manufacturing company Kennametal since 2015, Somers has more than a decade of hands-on experience with tungsten carbide manufacturing processes. At Kennametal, Somers serves as a lead operator for multiple industrial-scale additive-manufacturing systems.… Th…

The National Science Foundation (NSF) rescinded a rule that prohibited the use of “criteria or methods of administration which have the effect of subjecting individuals to discrimination because of their race, color or national origin.”  In the rule change, the NSF removed the words “or effect” from a rule that prohibited aid recipients from making selections of sites or locations of facilities “…

The GCMS-TQ8050 RX builds on the GCMS-TQ8050 NX, part of the NX series Shimadzu introduced in 2018, as the firm notes in an announcement. The earlier 8050 NX already supported femtogram-level detection using Off-Axis ion optics and noise-reduction technologies, and Shimadzu demonstrated a 0.14 fg instrument detection limit with its optional Boosted Efficiency Ion Source,… The post Shimadzu update…

Nobel Prize winner and deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, Ph.D., has frequently expressed concern that AI systems could escape human control. At a keynote at the AI4 event in Las Vegas, he pointed to developments that are “scary,” pointing to recent examples of AIs escaping sandboxes at prominent AI companies. “You are seeing AIs with… The post Where AI pioneers Hinton, Li and Ng converge and…

ChemGraph, an open-source AI framework from scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, lets scientists without computational chemistry expertise run quantum chemistry simulations through natural language prompts. Its creators also made a model-by-model reliability leaderboard that ranks models based on various criteria and tasks.  In a paper published early this year, the team evaluated ChemGraph…