Engineering Scientist Awards

NASA's Expedition 73 has yielded new insights into how microgravity affects human health and demonstrated advanced robotic control systems that could shape the future of planetary exploration.City lights glitter across the southern United States in this photograph taken from the International Space Station as it orbited into sunrise, 260 miles above Florida. In the right foreground, part of the station’s main solar arrays is visible, alongside a smaller set of roll-out solar arrays that help power the orbital outpost. Image Credit: NASA Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Expedition 73 crew conducted a series of studies examining the physical toll of extended spaceflight and testing robotic systems designed for remote planetary operations. The mission focused on understanding bone and cardiovascular changes in astronauts while evaluating new tools for controlling robotic vehicles in space environments. Why Long Missions Are So Tough on the Body Spending months in mic...

  NASA’s TRACERS (Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites) mission launched at 2:13 p.m. EDT atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Credit: SpaceX NASA’s newest mission, TRACERS, soon will begin studying how Earth’s magnetic shield protects our planet from the effects of space weather. Short for Tandem Reconnection and Cusp Electrodynamics Reconnaissance Satellites, the twin TRACERS spacecraft lifted off at 11:13 a.m. PDT (2:13 p.m. EDT) Wednesday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. “NASA is proud to launch TRACERS to demonstrate and expand American preeminence in space science research and technology,” said acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy. “The TRACERS satellites will move us forward in decoding space weather and further our understanding of the connection between Earth and the Sun. This mission will yiel...

by Will Kwong, University of Southern California edited by Sadie Harley, reviewed by Andrew Zinin Editors' notes Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, the question of how machines make decisions under uncertain conditions grows more urgent every day. How do we weigh competing values when outcomes are uncertain? What constitutes reasonable choice when perfect information is unavailable? These questions, once confined to academic philosophy, are now front and center as we delegate increasingly complex decisions to AI. A new large language model (LLM) framework developed by Willie Neiswanger, assistant professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and the USC School of Advanced Computing, along with students in the computer science department, combines classical decision theory and utility theory principles to significantly enhance AI's ability to face uncertainty and tackle those complex decisions. ...

  by Matt Cahill,   Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility  Editors' notes This illustration represents a ring-all-reduce setup of a computing cluster's graphics processing units, used to solve an inverse problem using an example from nuclear physics. Credit: Jefferson Lab/Joanna Griffin Solving life's great mysteries often requires detective work, using observed outcomes to determine their cause. For instance, nuclear physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility analyze the aftermath of particle interactions to understand the structure of the atomic nucleus. This type of subatomic sleuthing is known as the inverse problem. It is the opposite of a forward problem, where causes are used to calculate the effects. Inverse problems arise in many descriptions of physical phenomena, and often their solution is limited by the experimental data available. That's why scientists at Jefferson Lab and DOE's Argonne Nat...

A new study reveals that quantum networks can do more than secure communication, they can also test how quantum mechanics behaves in the warped spacetime described by Einstein’s theory of gravity. Credit: SciTechDaily.com Scientists demonstrate that quantum networks of clocks offer a new way to explore the interplay between quantum mechanics and curved space-time. Quantum networking is advancing rapidly across the globe. As a foundational technology in the emerging field of quantum science, it holds the promise of building a worldwide quantum internet. Such a system would allow for secure communication on a massive scale and make it possible to link quantum computers over vast distances. Efforts to turn this vision into reality are already well underway, both on the ground and in orbit. In a recent breakthrough, researchers have discovered that quantum networks may have capabilities beyond secure communication. A collaborative study led by Igor Pikovski from Stevens Institute of Techn...

  A major research centre that is set to position the UK as a global leader in clean technology, is being launched by the universities of Sheffield, Newcastle and Nottingham. A transdisciplinary collaboration of 10 universities, and over 33 industrial stakeholders, are leading a new research centre which is set to make the UK a leader in clean technology Great British Chemicals, led by the universities of Sheffield, Newcastle and Nottingham, will de-fossilise the chemical industry through world-first green chemistry Consortium will replace fossil petrochemicals and recycle industrial waste to create cleaner versions of the chemicals that underpin a huge range of products, goods and services we rely on everyday  A major new research centre that is set to position the UK as a global leader in clean technology by replacing fossil petrochemicals and recycling industrial waste using sustainable chemistry, is being launched by researchers at the universities of Sheffield, Newcastle ...

https://engineeringscientist.com/   Can artificial intelligence, or AI, potentially transform health care for the better? Now, rising to the challenge, an Arizona State University team of researchers has built a powerful new AI tool, called Ark + ,  to help doctors read chest X‑rays better and improve health care outcomes. "Ark+ is designed to be an open, reliable and ultimately useful tool in real-world health care systems," said Jianming "Jimmy" Liang, an ASU professor from the College of Health Solutions, and lead author of the study recently published in the prestigious journal Nature. In a proof-of-concept study, the new AI tool demonstrated exceptional capability in  diagnosis , from common lung diseases to rare and even emerging ones like COVID-19 or avian flu. It also was more accurate and outperformed proprietary software currently released by industry titans like Google and Microsoft. Our goal was to build a tool that not only performed well in our study b...

  A visual tour and from-scratch guide to train GRPO reasoning models in PyTorch Avishek Biswas Jul 8, 2025 23 min read Share Reasoning models  are currently  in fashion. DeepSeek-R1, Gemini-2.5-Pro, OpenAI’s O-series models, Anthropic’s Claude, Magistral, and Qwen3 — there is a new one every month. When you ask these models a question, they go into a  chain of thought  before generating an answer. A simple demonstration of what reasoning looks like. When asked a question, the Language Model (LM) generates a chain of thought first, followed by the answer. (Illustration by the Author) I recently asked myself the question, “Hmm… I wonder if I should write a Reinforcement Learning loop from scratch that teaches this ‘thinking’ behaviour to  really  small models —  like only 135 million   parameters “. It should be easy, right? Well, it wasn’t. Small models simply do not have the world knowledge that large models do. This makes < 1B parameter ...

  Presented as a step toward self-reliance, the measure to impose temporary restrictions on the import of low-ash metallurgical coke has drawn considerable scrutiny, sparking concerns over its broader economic and industrial ramifications. On December 26, 2024, the Union Government announced a six-month restriction on the import of low-ash metallurgical coke (met coke), a crucial ingredient in steel production. This policy, effective January 1, 2025, limits imports to 0.8 million tonnes per month, aiming to boost domestic production and reduce dependence on foreign suppliers. While the move aligns with the government’s broader push for “Atmanirbhar Bharat” (self-reliant India), its implications for the steel industry, trade relations, and environmental sustainability raise serious concerns. Metallurgical coke is indispensable for steelmaking, serving as a reducing agent in blast furnaces. India, the world’s second-largest steel producer, consumed over 136 million tonnes of steel in...