The Energy Tech Venture Forum (ETVF), hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, will convene innovators and investors at a Sept. 12 conference to connect ventures with Houston’s energy ecosystem. The forum is an anchor event for the inaugural Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week, happening Sept. 9-13. This week is a city-wide initiative to bring together and celebrate the momentum in Houston driving the energy transition. Many events are hosted at the Ion, Houston’s innovation hub powered by Rice.
Rice bioengineers developed a road map for the protein-protein interactions that give rise to gas vesicles, naturally occurring nanobubbles with potential use in biomedical applications.
Rice inaugurated a new research center dedicated to ‘forever chemicals’ on Wednesday during a visit to campus by representatives of the United States Army Engineer Research and Development Center.
A research traineeship program developed by a team of Rice faculty led by Junichiro Kono has received an award of $3 million over five years from the National Science Foundation to equip a new generation of scientists and engineers with the skills needed to serve as leaders in quantum technology innovation.
Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute is hosting the third annual AI in Health Conference Sept. 9-12 with themes this year including foundation models in medicine, LLM applications, AI in neuroscience and neurotechnology, digital twins in health care and patient engagement and equity in health AI.
OpenStax, the world’s largest nonprofit publisher of open educational resources (OER) based at Rice, announces a partnership with Google to expand access to relevant, trustworthy educational content. This partnership will enable the OpenStax library of more than 70 openly licensed, peer-reviewed textbooks to be discovered, searched and referenced within Google Gemini. These materials will be available to Gemini users 18 and older in the United States starting in August 2024.
Rice engineers have developed a smart material that could significantly enhance energy efficiency for indoor space cooling. The new thermochromic polymer blend has an estimated lifespan of 60 years and is lower cost than existing thermochromics.
Rice engineers have developed an AI machine learning system for real-time sensing of flooded roads through existing data sources and reporting mechanisms.
Texas’ energy reliability and the future of global energy supply chains are just a few of the topics addressed in the first annual Energy Insights – a collection of articles from fellows and scholars at the Center for Energy Studies (CES) from Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy that provides expert data and analysis on some of the most pressing policy issues affecting national and global energy markets.
Four Rice fellows and three Rice-affiliated startup ventures were selected to be a part of the inaugural Houston cohort of The Activate Fellowship for 2024. Activate is widely recognized as one of the flagship entrepreneurship programs that support startups focused on deep tech, and these four founders are the only representatives of Texas academia in the cohort.
Globally, 800 million people living in hundreds of urban areas will face grave social and economic risks from sea level rise and routine coastal flooding by 2050.
Rice bioengineers have harnessed the lotus effect to develop a system for culturing cancer cell clusters that can shed light on hard-to-study tumor properties. The new zinc oxide-based culturing surface mimics the lotus leaf surface structure, providing a highly tunable platform for the high-throughput generation of three-dimensional nanoscale tumor models.
