Inspired by nature’s work to build spiky structures in caves, engineers at Iowa State University have developed technology capable of recovering pure and precious metals from the alloys in our old phones and other electrical waste. Using controlled applications of oxygen and relatively low temperatures, the engineers say they can dealloy a metal by slowly…

Startup accelerators can help flesh out innovations and inspirations, plotting a path from idea to income. But after those programs end, the difficult work of building a company is just beginning, unfamiliar territory for founders of research-driven and high-technology startups. Follow-up is the gap Iowa Go-To-Market (G2M) hopes to fill. The new accelerator, which announced its first cohort Feb….

Let there be (ultraviolet) light. That’s the indication given by research conducted at Iowa State University regarding the use of ultraviolet light as a means of stopping the transmission of the virus that causes porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS), a costly swine disease that can spread through the air. Laboratory experiments showed that the…

Monitoring numerous labs with scaled-back users in response to the COVID-19 pandemic brought some unexpected exercise for materials science and engineering teaching laboratory specialist Ryan Braga. The pandemic forced many researchers and the faculty who teach in the labs to abruptly pack up and leave campus last March. But labs couldn’t be completely ignored, and…

Iowa State University’s 2021 Bailey Research Career Development award has been granted to a university researcher hoping to better understand and harness the power of cellular mitochondria to address a host of human health conditions. The Bailey award — administered by the Iowa State University Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR) — is…

Since its inception in 2017, the National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program at Iowa State has helped campus innovators evolve into emerging entrepreneurs. The Iowa State I-Corps Site was launched as a collaboration between the Office of the Vice President for Research and the Office of Economic Development and Industry Relations (EDIR). The…

Three Iowa State University physicists have spent the past decade helping to upgrade hardware and untangle messy proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. One result of their work is that the three have their names – Chunhui Chen, Jim Cochran and Soeren Prell – on the 2012 research paper describing how the collider’s ATLAS detector observed a new…

What does manure have in common with antibiotic resistance? For starters, they both stink, though in different ways. But there might be even more to the relationship than that. Researchers at Iowa State University recently received a $1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study how…

Fourteen Iowa State University students have been selected to receive $140,000 in Brown Graduate Fellowship Program funding to support strategic university research over the next year. Established in 2011 and administered by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), the annual Brown Graduate Fellowship Program is used to advance Iowa State research in…

An Iowa State University program to help Iowa towns harness their data has led to four offshoot projects to help support community recovery related to economic vulnerability, substance use and general support. A three-state Coordinated Innovation Network of land-grant universities worked over the past year to expand the Data Science for the Public Good program, developed…