by Iliyah Maddox | Sep 24, 2025 | business and economy, engineering and tech
Operating and maintaining highway rest areas across the United States has long posed a costly challenge for state transportation departments, especially amid tightening budgets and rising demand. In a new study, Dr. Kishor Shrestha, associate professor at Washington State University finds that one outsourcing method known as method-based contracting is significantly more cost-effective than its two main alternatives. The results offer transport officials a clearer path forward for running rest areas more efficiently, and could help to preventing costly, potentially dangerous closures in the future.
by Iliyah Maddox | Jul 24, 2025 | earth and environment, engineering and tech
By now, most of us are familiar with stories of wildlife interacting with the modern world, often with unfortunate consequences. Examples include urban foxes struck by vehicles, bears rummaging through trash, and sea turtles entangled in plastic. But there’s a quieter, often unseen danger that claims hundreds of millions of bird lives each year. This is the common window, a source of light for us, but potentially deadly for unsuspecting birds on the wing. Bird-window collisions (or BWCs for short) are a global phenomenon and a growing conservation concern. Birds in flight often fail to perceive clear or reflective glass as a barrier, leading to fatal crashes into windows, especially on modern buildings. Until recently, tracking the scope of this problem, especially in tropical and subtropical regions, has proven difficult. Traditional monitoring methods require trained observers, time-consuming surveys, and, critically, access to fresh bird carcasses, which can vanish quickly in warm, scavenger-rich environments. But in Taiwan, an innovative approach is offering new hope, and it’s coming from an unexpected place: social media.
by Iliyah Maddox | May 9, 2025 | biology, engineering and tech
Corn is a cornerstone of modern agricultural food production, particularly in North America. Humans have selectively bred such crops over generations to create better yields, improved appearance and flavor and enhanced disease resistance. However, what if we could skip these arduous rounds of selective breeding and improve a crop’s stability and reliability regardless? Deep within the genetic blueprint of every maize kernel, scientists are aiming to achieve just this. In a recent groundbreaking study, Dr. Jon Reinders of Corteva Agriscience and his colleagues have unveiled a powerful new way to create genetically improved corn, not in a lab dish, but inside the plant itself. This new method is faster, cleaner, safer, and could transform how we grow our most essential crops.
by Iliyah Maddox | Apr 7, 2025 | arts and humanities, engineering and tech
Words change their meanings over time, but tracking these changes has traditionally required painstaking manual analysis by linguists. In recent years, researchers have been using computational models to automatically detect when semantic change happens, and how much of a change has occurred. Recent research led by Associate Professor Nina Tahmasebi and her colleagues in the Change is Key! program introduces innovative computational methods for detecting qualitative features of semantic change, opening new possibilities for understanding language evolution at scale.
by Iliyah Maddox | Mar 28, 2025 | engineering and tech
Recent research from Professor Maryam Mehrnezhad at the Information Security Department, Royal Holloway University of London and a team of researchers reveals widespread privacy, security and regulatory failings in female-oriented health technologies (also known as FemTech). The researchers’ comprehensive analysis demonstrates how current practices leave sensitive health information vulnerable, while highlighting an urgent need for reform across technical, legal and social dimensions of digital healthcare.
by Iliyah Maddox | Mar 26, 2025 | engineering and tech
In order to operate safely and efficiently, lithium-ion batteries rely on battery management systems to monitor their state and to control their operation. An essential part of this process is modelling battery behaviour under different conditions to predict performance and prevent failures. To do this efficiently, it is crucial to simplify the underlying physical processes, while sacrificing as little accuracy as possible. Through their research, Dr. Luc Raijmakers and colleagues at the Jülich Research Centre, Germany, compare various different approaches to simplifying simulations. Their results could make it easier for battery operators to decide which approach is best suited to their requirements for accuracy and computational efficiency.
