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Hybrid car sales have taken off in recent years, with a fuel-sipping combination of electric- and gas-powered technologies that simultaneously deliver energy efficiency, low emissions, and strong performance. The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)—which played a pivotal role in putting hybrids on the road—has applied a similar strategy to its talent base and partnerships, bringing together the best minds from the worlds of research and industry.

Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands and the University of Central Florida (CREOL), report in the journal Nature Photonics the successful transmission of a record high 255 Terabits/s over a new type of fiber allowing 21 times more bandwidth than currently available in communication networks. This new type of fiber could be an answer to mitigating the impending optical transmission capacity crunch caused by the increasing bandwidth demand.

What Microsoft users in business care deeply about—-a system architecture that supports efforts to get their work done efficiently; a work-centric menu to quickly access projects rather than weather readings and movie trailers; and an architecture that helps protect their identity and information. Small wonder that Microsoft is talking up the security feature of its next-generation Windows 10 operating system.

Amazon has long acted like an ideal customer on its own website: a freewheeling big spender with no worries about balancing a checkbook. Investors confident in founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ invest-and-expand strategy flooded into the stock as the company revolutionized shopping, upended the book industry and took on the cloud—even though its vast range of initiatives ate up all the company’s profits.

Doctoral student Emma Tosch of University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Computer Science won a Best Paper award this week at the premier international computer programming language design conference in Portland, Ore., for her work on “Surveyman,” a first-of-its-kind software system for designing, deploying and automatically debugging surveys to improve their accuracy and trustworthiness.

While space debris was the uncontrolled adversary in the award-winning space thriller film “Gravity,” space debris, also known as “space junk,” is an ongoing real-life concern for teams managing satellites orbiting Earth, including NOAA-NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership, or Suomi NPP, satellite. It is not unusual for satellites that have the capability of maneuvering to be repositioned to avoid debris or to maintain the proper orbit.

The New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) Research Institute, through the launch of its repository in 2015, will provide for the first time the largest-ever number of stem cell lines available to the scientific research community. Initially, over 600 induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell lines and 1,000 cultured fibroblasts from over 1,000 unique human subjects will be made available, with an increasing number available in the first year

A start-up company in Scotland is working to capitalize on the tons of waste produced by one of the country’s most valued industries and turn the dregs of whisky-making into fuel. Celtic Renewables, formed in 2011, has refined its process based on a century-old fermentation technique and is now taking the next step toward a commercial plant, according to an article in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society.

DNA has garnered attention for its potential as a programmable material platform that could spawn entire new and revolutionary nanodevices in computer science, microscopy, biology, and more. Researchers have been working to master the ability to coax DNA molecules to self assemble into the precise shapes and sizes needed in order to fully realize these nanotechnology dreams.

Some years ago, when Ebola was not in any global news headlines, researchers presented their paper, “Use of Medical Robotics in Biothreat Situations” to an American Medical Informatics Association symposium where they said that “In biothreat situations, mobile robots have several advantages over humans including: imperviousness to infection; ability to be coated in self-decontaminating surfaces; 24-hour availability; and the ability to serve as a virtual telepresence and communication conduit for one or more participants.