For all his successes at Rensselaer—a double major in biochemistry and biophysics, with minors in chemistry and psychology thrown in, Dean’s List every semester, a Rensselaer Medal, and several successful game designs, all packed into three years—Cole Funk is especially gratified by one particular accomplishment: Helping other students.

For Jazmyn Borman, choosing a college was easy. One tour of Rensselaer and its nationally ranked Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Program, and “I knew I wanted to be part of that community.”

Powerful hurricanes and earthquakes have wreaked havoc in the United States and around the world in recent years, often leaving people stranded for months and even years without access to water, food, and shelter. A unique collaborative project at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute seeks to provide a sustainable solution, while also considering the environment.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Tetherless World Professor of Computer Science Deborah McGuinness has received a three-year, $1.77 million award to develop digital knowledge infrastructure as part of the Dynamic Spectrum Access Policy Development project, initiated as part of a reallocation of sections of the federally controlled radio frequency spectrum.

A new report published by researchers M. Hakan Hekimoğlu of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Burak Kazaz of Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management outlines a new approach to predicting the release prices of Bordeaux wines (known as En Primeur prices) using weather information and the Liv-ex 100 index. According to their models, we can expect slight price increases this year, on average, for the 2017 vintage wines.

Heat pipes are devices to keep critical equipment from overheating. They transfer heat from one point to another through an evaporation-condensation process and are used in everything from cell phones and laptops to air conditioners and spacecraft.   Normally, heat pipes contain porous metal wicks that return liquid to the heated end of the pipe where it evaporates. But engineers are working to develop wickless heat pipes that are lighter and more reliable. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute initiated the Constrained Vapor Bubble (CVB) project to study these wickless heat pipes for use in near-zero gravity environments for aerospace applications.  

Aquaporins are proteins that serve as water channels to regulate the flow of water across biological cell membranes. They also remove excess salt and impurities in the body, and it is this aspect that has led to much interest in recent years in how to mimic the biochemical processes of aquaporins potentially for water desalination systems.   An international team of researchers co-led by Georges Belfort has discovered water, in the form of “water wires,” contained in another molecule—the imidazole—a nitrogen-based organic compound that could be used as a potential building block for artificial aquaporins. The findings were recently published in Science Advances by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Belfort is Institute Professor and professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

[The Jefferson Project at Lake George is conducting ongoing research into how human activities may be affecting the lake. This guest blog by Devin Jones, a former postdoctoral research associate in the lab of Jefferson Project Director Rick Relyea, summarizes recent research published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The Jefferson Project is a […]

A team of researchers is using network analysis techniques – popularized through social media applications – to find patterns in Earth’s natural history, as detailed in a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS).  

The Center for Financial Studies in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will host a one-day workshop titled Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Financial Services. The workshop will take place on April 27 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies Auditorium on campus.