Seven research teams win Carbon Hub funding
March 8, 2021
Carbon Hub, Rice University's zero-emissions research initiative, has awarded seed grants for seven projects that will rapidly advance its vision for transforming the oil and gas sector into a leading provider of both clean hydrogen energy and solid carbon products that can be used in place of materials with large carbon footprints.
Cancer ‘guardian’ breaks bad with one switch
March 5, 2021
A mutation that replaces a single amino acid in a potent tumor-suppressing protein makes it prone to nucleating amyloid fibrils implicated in many cancers as well as neurological diseases.
Christopher Tunnell wins NSF CAREER Award
March 5, 2021
Rice University computational astroparticle physicist Christopher Tunnell is getting help in his search for the nature of the universe through a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award.
Camera traps reveal newly discovered biodiversity relationship
March 3, 2021
In one of the first studies of its kind, an analysis of camera-trap data from 15 wildlife preserves in tropical rainforests revealed a previously unknown relationship between the biodiversity of mammals and the forests in which they live.
Bottling the world's coldest plasma
February 28, 2021
Rice University physicists have discovered a way to trap the world's coldest plasma in a magnetic bottle, a technological achievement that could advance research into clean energy, space weather and astrophysics.
Quantum quirk yields giant magnetic effect, where none should exist
February 26, 2021
In a twist befitting the strange nature of quantum mechanics, physicists have discovered the Hall effect — a characteristic change in the way electricity is conducted in the presence of a magnetic field — in a nonmagnetic quantum material to which no magnetic field was applied.
Bioinformatics tool accurately tracks synthetic DNA
February 26, 2021
A Rice computer science lab challenges -- and beats -- deep learning in a test to see if a new bioinformatics approach effectively tracks the lab of origin of a synthetic genetic sequence.