What if microgravity holds the key to preventing the overheating of advanced electronics? That’s one idea behind an International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory-sponsored investigation that recently launched to station on Northrop Grumman’s 19th Commercial Resupply Services mission (NG-19). This week, the ISS crew is working on the experiment, which aims to improve the efficiency of heat transfer devices used in various technologies, from laptops to NASA’s Hubble Telescope.

Today, it was announced that Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will become the first university in the world to house an IBM Quantum System One. The IBM quantum computer, intended to be operational by January of 2024, will serve as the foundation of a new IBM Quantum Computational Center in partnership with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). By partnering, RPI’s vision is to greatly enhance the educational experiences and research capabilities of students and researchers at RPI and other institutions, propel the Capital Region into a top location for talent, and accelerate New York's growth as a technology epicenter.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Ge Wang, Ph.D. — Clark & Crossan Endowed Chair Professor, director of the Biomedical Imaging Center within the Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D. Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies, and this year’s winner of the Wiley Distinguished Faculty Award — and Albany Medical College’s Joshua Goldwag ’20, a medical student and previously Ge Wang’s research student at Rensselaer, have jointly published an article in Nature Machine Intelligence on the DishBrain experiment and its applications. Last October, Cortical Labs revealed that they “taught” human and mouse cells in a dish to work together to play the Pong game by providing feedback to the cells. They called it DishBrain. It was the first time that scientists stimulated biological cells in a structured/feedback-driven way.

When most people think of crystals, they picture suncatchers that act as rainbow prisms or the semi-transparent stones that some believe hold healing powers. However, to scientists and engineers, crystals are a form of materials in which their constituents – atoms, molecules, or nanoparticles – are arranged regularly in space. In other words, crystals are defined by the regular arrangement of their constituents. Common examples are diamonds, table salt, or sugar cubes. 

We all remember 2020. At the grocery store, toilet paper shelves were empty. Cleaning supplies and disinfectants were treasured finds. Rattled consumers, concerned that they would run out of essential items, swiftly stockpiled products until they disappeared from shelves. In the media, it was referred to as “panic buying.”

“One side can start the polarization and keep it going forever, but it takes two sides to stop it. That’s why it easily arises, but it’s so difficult to end,” Boleslaw Szymanski said. Szymanski is the Claire & Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and director of the Network Science and Technology Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Michael Amitay, James L. Decker ’45 Endowed Professor in Aerospace Engineering and director for the Center for Flow Physics and Control (CeFPaC), was elected as a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society. The society is the only international professional body working to advance aeronautical art, science, and engineering around the world. With more than 25,000 members and corporate partners, the society is dedicated to moving research forward in the aerospace aviation and space communities through information sharing.

Steven Cramer, the William Weightman Walker Professor of Polymer Engineering and a professor in the Isermann Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering for “scientific and technological advances leading to new chromatographic materials, processes, and predictive tools for the purification of biopharmaceuticals.”

Food access is one of the largest social problems in the United States. The challenge of accessing healthy foods is especially pronounced in communities of disadvantaged populations. Research led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) proposes to develop a local food cooperation (LFC) program that integrates a state-level food hub network to enable the coordination of multiple regional food hubs, and regional farm to institution programs that address regional food insecurity and inequity.

A team of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute led by Helen Zha, assistant professor in the Isermann Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, has been awarded a $745,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore sustainable alternatives to the synthetic textiles used in “fast fashion.”