Preston, four others win Ig Nobel Prize for ‘necrobotic’ spider study
Mechanical Engineering’s Daniel Preston, three graduate students and a postdoctoral fellow have won a 2023 Ig Nobel Prize for their “necrobotic” robot arm that incorporated a dead spider.
Rice President Reginald DesRoches and Texas Medical Center President and CEO Bill McKeon joined other university leaders Sept. 12 at a ceremony that simultaneously marked the start of the Rice Biotech Launch Pad and the 61st anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s 1962 speech at Rice Stadium announcing the Apollo moonshot program.
Rice University today introduced the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a Houston-based accelerator focused on expediting the translation of the university’s health and medical technology discoveries into cures.
Rice to host International Space University program in 2024
Rice University and NASA’s Johnson Space Center will host the International Space University’s 2024 Space Studies Program, an intensive, eight-week summer program for professionals in space-related fields that will be held on Rice’s campus next summer.
SCI Summer Research Colloquium awards; Applied physics students study in France
Gold buckyballs, oft-used nanoparticle ‘seeds’ are one and the same
Rice chemists have discovered that tiny gold “seed” particles, a key ingredient in one of the most common nanoparticle recipes, are one and the same as gold buckyballs, 32-atom spheres that are cousins of the Nobel Prize-winning carbon buckyballs discovered at Rice in 1985.
Weaker transcription factors are better when they work together
Rice bioengineer Caleb Bashor and colleagues have developed a generalizable method to address “off-target” gene activation, a significant problem in the field of synthetic biology. Taking a cue from nature, the researchers showed they could all but eliminate the activation of off-target genes by designing weak transcription factors that cooperatively assemble.
Cost-effective jaundice testing developed for low-resource hospitals
The Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies has validated the accuracy of its latest testing technology for newborn jaundice. BiliDx addresses a critical gap in the availability of accurate, affordable, point-of-care jaundice testing in low-resource hospitals.
When D turns to F, quantum matter is A-plus
In a potential boon for quantum computing, Rice physicists have shown that topologically protected quantum states can be entangled with other, highly manipulable quantum states in some electronic materials.
IBB spotlights summer undergraduate research
Undergraduate research was in the spotlight July 28 at Rice’s Summer Undergraduate Research Symposium, where judges awarded best-poster honors to 10 students in eight categories.
Rice researchers earn prestigious Defense Department grants
Rice professors Qimiao Si and Jeffrey Tabor are recipients of prestigious 2023 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowships from the Department of Defense.
Asteroid named for Rice planetary scientist
An asteroid has been named for Rice planetary scientist André Izidoro, a newly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences.
Rice engineers’ storage technology keeps nanosurfaces clean
Rice mechanical engineers improved on a 50-year-old idea to create container technology that keeps volatile organic compounds from accumulating on the surfaces of stored nanomaterials.
Reporters broadcast live, on-the-scene, inside living cells
Synthetic biologists from Rice University and Princeton University have demonstrated “live reporter” technology that can reveal the workings of signaling networks in living cells with far greater precision than current methods. The first-of-its-kind reporting tool can show how quickly signaling networks respond and how responses vary from cell to cell in time and space.
NeuWS camera answers ‘holy grail problem’ in optical imaging
Engineers from Rice and the University of Maryland have created technology that could allow cameras to "see" through fog, smoke, driving rain, murky water, skin, muscle and other light-scattering obstructions.
