Title
Topic
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‘The Emergence and Loss of Cyclic Peptides in Nicotiana Illuminate Dynamics and Mechanisms of Plant Metabolic Evolution’
“While the class of ribosomally synthesized, post-translationally modified peptides (RiPPs) represents a major source of antibiotics and bioactive compounds, plant RiPPs are relatively understudied compared to those from microbial sources. Here, we resurrect an extinct peptide cyclase from the coyote tobacco through analysis of its functional relatives in other species. This cyclase installs a carbon–carbon macrocycle into heptapeptides, expanding the diversity of plant-derived cyclic peptides. By interconverting two distinct cyclases through targeted mutations, we illuminate how these enzymes evolve new functions.” Find the paper and full list of authors in PNAS.
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‘tRNA Kinetics on the Ribosome Depends Nonmonotonically on Intersubunit Rotation’
“To translate messenger RNA into proteins, the ribosome must coordinate a wide range of conformational rearrangements. Some steps involve individual molecules, whereas others require synchronization of multiple collective motions. … While decades of biochemical, single-molecule, and structural analysis have provided many insights into the timing of these motions, little is known about how these dynamical processes influence each other. To address this, we use molecular simulations to isolate specific interactions that allow tRNA kinetics to be controlled by subunit rotation.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Biophysical Journal.
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‘A Network Approach to White Band Disease…’
“Coral reefs are increasingly threatened by disease outbreaks, yet little is known about the genetic mechanisms underlying disease resistance. Since the 1970s, White Band Disease (WBD) has decimated the Caribbean staghorn coral Acropora cervicornis. However, 15% or more of individuals are highly disease-resistant, and the genes controlling the production of Argonaut proteins, involved in microRNA (miRNA) post-transcriptional gene silencing, are up-regulated in WBD-resistant corals. … In this study, we conducted an in situ disease transmission experiment. … We identified 67 bona fide miRNAs in A. cervicornis.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Ecology and Evolution.
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Hajjar receives 2025 William H. Wisely American Civil Engineer Award
“Civil and enviromental engineering professor Jerome Hajjar was selected to receive the 2025 William H. Wisely American Civil Engineer Award for his exceptional ‘leadership in advancing civil engineering education, computational analysis, experimental testing, field investigation and design of resilient and sustainable steel and composite steel/concrete buildings, bridges and infrastructure systems; regional simulation; structural stability; and earthquake engineering.'”
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‘Discovering Ni/Cu Single-Atom Alloy as a Highly Active and Selective Catalyst for Direct Methane Conversion to Ethylene: A First-Principles Kinetic Study’
“Direct methane conversion to liquid fuels or value-added chemicals is a promising technology to utilize natural resources without resorting to further petroleum extraction. However, discovering efficient catalysts for this reaction is challenging due to either coke formation or unfavorable C–H bond activation. Herein, we design single-atom alloy (SAA) catalysts to simultaneously eliminate the above two bottlenecks based on mechanism-guided strategies.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ACS Catalysis.
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‘Mental Models Matter: Conceptualizations of the Human–Nature Relationship…’
“Mental models—internal, dynamic, incomplete representations of the external world that people use to guide cognitive processes such as reasoning, decision making, and language comprehension—have practical implications for predicting attitudes and behaviors across various domains. This study examines how mental models of the human–nature relationship predict pro-environmental behavioral intentions directly and indirectly as mediated through anthropocentric and biocentric environmental attitudes.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Sustainability.
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Xu receives DAC Under-40 Innovators Award
“Electrical and computer engineering assistant professor Xiaolin Xu was named a recipient of the 2025 IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovators Award. This prestigious honor recognizes up to five early-career researchers each year whose pioneering work is shaping the future of electronic design and automation—spanning emerging areas such as neuromorphic computing, biological systems, cybersecurity and cyber-physical systems.”
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Shrivastava receives DARPA director fellowship
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Aatmesh Shrivastava has been awarded the highly selective DARPA Director’s Fellowship Award. This elite recognition goes to top performers of DARPA’s Young Faculty Award program, which Shrivastava received previously for ‘Nano-Watt Power Machine-Learning Hardware Using Precision Analog Computing.’ This year, Shrivastava stood among only 12 recipients nationwide across all disciplines, underscoring his exceptional contributions to cutting-edge research.”
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“Mechanical and industrial engineering assistant professor Juner Zhu and research scientist Wei Li were awarded a $500,000 NSF three-year grant for ‘Mechanics Informatics for Learning Constitutive Models: Theory, Computation, and Uncertainty Quantification.'”
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‘Advanced Deposition Methods for Mixed Metal Alloys and Hydroxides as High-Performance Catalysts for the Hydrogen Evolution Reaction’
“Alkaline water and anion-exchange membrane electrolyzers are considered leading solutions for the large-scale production of hydrogen due to their lower capital costs. In recent years, numerous hydrogen evolution electrocatalysts have been developed, primarily by alloying nickel with other transition metals. Despite these advancements, stability remains a challenge due to the low intrinsic corrosion resistance of these alloys. In this work, we present an advanced synthesis method that incorporates an amorphous copper hydroxide phase within a nickel–copper alloy using a pH-trap mechanism.” Find the paper and full list of authors in ACS Catalysis.
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‘Foundations of Scalable Systems’
This textbook from Ian Gorton, professor of the practice and director of mobility programs, “covers design approaches and technologies that make it possible to scale an application quickly and cost-effectively,” according to the publisher’s webpage. This can be crucial, because “scalability becomes the primary driver as the user base grows. Attractive features and high utility breed success, which brings more requests to handle and more data to manage.”
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‘Time-Warping Analysis for Biological Signals: Methodology and Application’
“Any set of biological signals has variability, both in the temporal and spatial domains. To extract characteristic features of the ensemble, these spatiotemporal profiles are typically summarized by their mean and variance, often requiring prior padding or resampling of the data to equalize signal length. Such compression can conceal essential information in the signal. This work presents the method of time-warping, reformulated as elastic functional data analysis (EFDA), in an accessible way.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Scientific Reports.
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‘Higher-Order Connectomics of Human Brain Function Reveals Local Topological Signatures’
“Traditional models of human brain activity often represent it as a network of pairwise interactions between brain regions. Going beyond this limitation, recent approaches have been proposed to infer higher-order interactions from temporal brain signals involving three or more regions. However, to this day it remains unclear whether methods based on inferred higher-order interactions outperform traditional pairwise ones for the analysis of fMRI data. To address this question, we conducted a comprehensive analysis using fMRI time series of 100 unrelated subjects from the Human Connectome Project.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Human Mobility Is Well Described by Closed-Form Gravity-Like Models Learned Automatically from Data’
“Modeling human mobility is critical to address questions in urban planning, sustainability, public health, and economic development. However, our understanding and ability to model flows between urban areas are still incomplete. … Here, we show that simple machine-learned, closed-form models of mobility can predict mobility flows as accurately as complex machine learning models, and extrapolate better.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Nature Communications.
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‘Data-Driven Techniques in Rheology: Developments, Challenges and Perspective’
“With the rapid development and adoption of different data-driven techniques in rheology, this review aims to reflect on the advent and growth of these frameworks, survey the state-of-the-art methods relevant to rheological applications, and explore potential future directions. We classify different machine learning (ML) methodologies into data-centric and physics-informed frameworks.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Current Opinion in Colloid & Interface Science.
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Cassella receives EFTF Young Scientist Award
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Cristian Cassella is the recipient of the European Frequency and Time Forum (EFTF) Young Scientist Award ‘for his seminal research on metamaterials in RF microacoustics as well as for his pioneering contributions on long-range remote sensors and lower-noise frequency generators through parametric nonlinearities.’ The award is conferred in recognition of a personal contribution that demonstrated a high degree of initiative and creativity and led to already established or easily foreseeable outstanding advances in the field of time and frequency metrology.”
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‘Epitaxial Strain Tuning of Er3+ in Ferroelectric Thin Films’
“ER3+ color centers are promising candidates for quantum science and technology due to their long electron and nuclear spin coherence times, as well as their desirable emission wavelength. By selecting host materials with suitable, controllable properties, we introduce new parameters that can be used to tailor the ER3+ emission spectrum.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Applied Physics.
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‘Topological Data Analysis Based Characteristics of Electroencephalogram Signals in Children With Sleep Apnea’
“This study aims to identify differences in the functional neural connectivity of the brain of paediatric patients with obstructive sleep apnea. Using EEG signals from 3673 paediatric patients, we grouped subjects into OSA or control groups based on sleep oxygen desaturation levels and apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), and applied topological data analysis (TDA) techniques. We evaluated our approach through statistical testing of TDA-based EEG features, which indicate fundamental differences in the functional neural connectivity of subjects with sleep apnea as compared to controls.” Find the paper and full list of authors in the Journal of Sleep Research.
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‘3D spatial distribution of Sost mRNA and sclerostin protein expression in response to in vivo tibia loading in female mice’
“Bones adapt to external mechanical loads through a process known as mechanoadaptation. Osteocytes are the bone cells that sense the mechanical environment and initiate a biological response. Investigating the changes in osteocyte molecular expression following mechanical loading has been instrumental in characterizing the regulatory pathways involved in bone adaptation. … We used WISH-BONE (Whole-mount In Situ Histology of Bone) to investigate the spatial distribution of Sost-mRNA transcripts and its encoded protein, sclerostin, in 3D mouse tibia midshaft following in vivo tibia loading. Our findings showed a decrease in the percentage of Sost-positive osteocytes.” Find the paper and authors list in…
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Patent for ‘robotic aquaculture system and methods’
Professors Joseph Ayers, Mark Patterson, Jerome Hajjar, Milica Stojanovic and Amy Mueller were awarded a patent for “Robotic aquaculture system and methods.”
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Abur receives IEEE PES Charles Concordia Power Systems Engineering Award
Electrical and computer engineering university distinguished professor Ali Abur received the 2025 IEEE Power and Energy Society (PES) Charles Concordia Power Systems Engineering Award “for contributions to power system state and network model estimation.”
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‘Building the Future of Food Safety Technology’
Associate teaching professor Darin Detwiler presents a textbook that “focuses on evaluating, developing, testing and predicting Blockchain’s impact on the food industry, the types of regulatory compliance needed, and other topics important pertaining to consumers,” according to the publisher’s web page. “Building the Future of Food Safety Technology: Blockchain and Beyond” introduces blockchain to the topic of food safety, which “is being looked at more and more as a solution to food-supply problems.”
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‘Optics for Engineers’
Associate professor of electrical and computer engineer Charles DiMarzio “provides an accessible introduction to the fundamentals of geometric and physical optics as they relate to practical problems encountered by engineers and researchers” with his textbook “Optics for Engineers,” according to the publisher’s web page. In a new edition, DiMarzio “focuses on topics that are critical to understanding how the basic principles of optics affect design decisions.”
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‘Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People With Information’
Assistant professor of journalism Rahul Bhargava’s book, “Community Data: Creative Approaches to Empowering People With Information,” aims to align data science “with good social outcomes, learning from the practices of newspapers, museums, community groups, artists, and libraries,” according to the book’s Amazon page. Bhargava’s book also “introduces a community-driven framework as a response to the urgent need to realign data theories and methods around justice and empowerment,” while expanding storytellers’ toolkits beyond “the limited vocabulary of surveys, spreadsheets, charts and graphs.”
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Cassella receives patent for improving RF filtering
“Electrical and computer engineering associate professor Cristian Cassella was awarded a patent for ‘Two dimensional rod resonator for RF filtering.'”
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‘Low dimensionality of Phenotypic Space as an Emergent Property of Coordinated Teams in Biological Regulatory Networks’
“Cell-fate decisions involve coordinated genome-wide expression changes, typically leading to a limited number of phenotypes. Although often modeled as simple toggle switches, these rather simplistic representations often disregard the complexity of regulatory networks governing these changes. Here, we unravel design principles underlying complex cell decision-making networks in multiple contexts.” Find the paper and full list of authors in Cell Press.