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On 9/11, lawmakers from both parties unified in their response. Just over 20 years later, Congress is distinctly partisan, clashing on everything from the January 6 insurrection to COVID to climate change. Why? Many blame widespread and widely believed misinformation and disinformation. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Boleslaw Szymanski, Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, is part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers examining the flow of (mis)information in social media.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Professor Catherine Royer will be honored as a 2023 Society Fellow of the Biophysical Society. Royer is a Chaired Constellation Professor in Biocomputation and Bioinformatics; professor of biological sciences, and chemistry and chemical biology; and director of the graduate program in biochemistry and physics.

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A few years ago, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Sasha Wagner, assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences, proved false what scientists had thought for years. Soot-like molecules that formed an ancient carbon pool deep in the Pacific Ocean did not, in fact, originate from wildfires on land.“We discovered that there was an isotopic mismatch,” Wagner said.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Oshani Seneviratne, director of health data research at the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA), and Lirong Xia, associate professor of computer science, have been awarded $363,343 from the Algorand Foundation. The award is part of an $8 million grant to fund blockchain research through a project led by Vassilis Zikas, associate professor of computer science and security researcher at Purdue University.

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News headlines on extreme weather, melting ice caps, and threatened species are daily reminders of our changing environment. The profound scale and intensity of these challenges may leave one to wonder, “What should we do first?” Researchers recently developed formulas that help answer that question, effectively creating a method to triage declining ecosystems by measuring and comparing their distance to tipping points.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s (RPI) incoming Class of 2026 is the largest first-year group of undergraduate students in the history of the Institute, the country’s first technological research university founded in 1824. With first-year enrollment at 2,012, the 2026 class bucks the national trend of declining college enrollment and sets the university on a strong path to academic and career success with new RPI President, Martin A.

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When expensive medicines that are proven to prevent HIV acquisition are available through employer-sponsored health insurance (ESI), annual earnings for men in same-sex couples decline and part-time employment increases. The labor market effects are largest for young white men, who are among those most likely to be taking HIV prevention drugs.

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Thanks to a $304,084 Major Research Instrumentation award from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is now home to a state-of-the-art single-crystal X-ray diffractometer. The grant was awarded to a team of faculty led by Edwin Fohtung, associate professor of materials science and engineering.

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Dr. Yangyang Xu, assistant professor of mathematical sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has received a $250,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research challenges associated with distributed big data in machine learning.Machine learning algorithms allow computers to make decisions, predictions, and recommendations on the basis of input training data without being explicitly told what information to look for in the data.

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The COVID-19 pandemic, bigger and more frequent wildfires, devastating floods, and powerful storms have become unfortunate facts of life. With each disaster, people depend on the emergency response of governments, nonprofit organizations, and the private sector for aid when their lives are upended. However, a complicating factor in delivering that aid is that people tend to disperse with such disasters.

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Women are excluded from promotions when firms look at potential, rather than proof, says Dr. Nishtha Langer, an associate professor in the Lally School of Management at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Scott Forth, assistant professor of biological sciences, and Peter Kramer, professor of mathematical sciences, have received a $359,572 grant  from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop a better understanding of a cellular process that, when errors occur, is linked to cancer.

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Concerns regarding scarcity, high prices, and safety regarding the long-term use of lithium-ion batteries has prompted a team of researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to propose a greener, more efficient, and less expensive energy storage alternative.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Science has appointed two new department heads. Mohammed Zaki now leads the Department of Computer Science and Gyorgy Korniss leads the Department of Physics, Applied Physics, and Astronomy. The departments are ranked third and fourth in the state of New York, respectively, and 24th nationally by College Factual.

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About 201 million years ago, volcanic eruptions covered an area roughly the size of South America in lava as Pangaea started to split. The Earth was changed. In the years that followed, 40% of all four-legged land animals were wiped out in the End Triassic Extinction (ETE). The exact cause was unknown. However, researchers recently discovered that atmospheric changes as a result of the eruptions caused freezing temperatures at high latitudes. The land animals that survived had feathers or hair as insulation: large dinosaurs.

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As our devices become smaller, faster, more energy efficient, and capable of holding larger amounts of data, spintronics may continue that trajectory. Whereas electronics is based on the flow of electrons, spintronics is based on the spin of electrons.

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Alicia Walf from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute offers reasons why people procrastinate when stressed.

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In research published recently in Nature Reviews Materials, a multidisciplinary team of chemical engineers, materials scientists, and mechanical engineers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute demonstrate that using nanotechnology in batteries will improve battery performance.

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“Financial technologies offer great promise to tackle climate change and provide pathways for developing sustainable economies,” says Aparna Gupta, co-director of the Center for Research toward Advancing Financial Technologies, the first-ever fintech research center backed by the National Science Foundation.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers Gaetano Montelione and Christopher Cioffi will use a five-year, $3.5 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to develop a low-dose, oral COVID antiviral drug that can be administered at home.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers have developed an accessible way to make N95 face masks not only effective barriers to germs, but on-contact germ killers. The antiviral, antibacterial masks can potentially be worn longer, causing less plastic waste as the masks do not need to be replaced as frequently.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute President Shirley Ann Jackson today announced the launch of the Rensselaer Institute for Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Computing (DAIC).

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In a new book, Northern Sparks: Innovation, Technology Policy, and the Arts in Canada from Expo 67 to the Internet Age, Professor Michael Century of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute brings a unique perspective to the emergence of the digital age set in a specifically Canadian narrative.

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A new project from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to develop a predictive model for how tiny virus particles behave in the lungs holds the potential to significantly impact COVID research. The fluid dynamics proposal was recently awarded a three-year National Science Foundation grant for $298,000.

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A new theory of economic decision-making from Mina Mahmoudi, a lecturer in the Department of Economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, offers an explanation as to why humans, in general, make decisions that are simply adequate, not optimal.

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New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that the mental workload of intensive care unit nurses can successfully be evaluated using eye-movement tracking glasses.

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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai today announced the creation of the Center for Engineering and Precision Medicine (CEPM), one of the first centers in the nation to bridge engineering and engineering science with medicine.

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New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that when service-industry companies respond with the right mix of rational and emotional cues that match the nature of complaints in negative reviews, it can positively impact the perception and ratings of future customers as well as the complaining customer.

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GameFest, the annual student game development showcase hosted by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will be held on Saturday, April 30 at 2 p.m.

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New research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that innovative business models that tap into extra warehouse space can be a potential solution for companies with changing demand requirements or tight fulfillment windows.

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As the demand for home deliveries from online purchases continues to increase, researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute recently found that some, but not all consumers, will accept going to alternate delivery locations to get their packages rather than having them delivered directly to their front door.

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Colson Whitehead, author of The New York Times bestsellers The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys, will speak virtually at the 81st annual McKinney Writing Award ceremony on Wednesday, April 6 at 7 p.m.

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In-vitro fertilization (IVF) clinics that offer money-back guarantees (MBGs) for their services achieve a higher live-birth success rate with less aggressive treatments than clinics that do not provide money-back guarantees.

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Research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that traffic accidents decreased by nearly half during the two-month period at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when residents of most states were under a stay-at-home order.

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Two new research projects from the School of Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have been selected by the Advanced Robotics for Manufacturing (ARM) Institute to receive funding to develop tools that will address critical aspects of robotic manufacturing technologies.

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Astrophysicists for the first time have calculated the original mass and size of a dwarf galaxy that was shredded in a collision with the Milky Way billions of years ago.

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The brain’s ability to clear a protein closely linked to Alzheimer’s disease is tied to our circadian cycle, according to research published in PLOS Genetics.

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In an era when investors can easily find information online about company performance, research from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute shows that traditional reports created by sell-side analysts are a valuable resource for activist hedge fund investors.

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In the first comprehensive study investigating the initial adoption and continuance intention of delivery services during a pandemic, Cara Wang, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, found that over 90% of people who use delivery services will likely revert back to their original way of shopping.

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The Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment (CITE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will engage in research to advance understanding of the freight transportation industry in conjunction with the Super Truck 3 program at the U.S. Department of Energy.

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Hemp is going to be a game-changer across many industries, from building and construction to agriculture, all while reducing our carbon footprint, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is leading the way in making that a reality.

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A grant from the National Science Foundation will allow Shayla Sawyer and Rick Relyea, two professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, to better understand the growing problem of harmful algal blooms (HABs).

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Whether a transformer catches fire in a power grid, a species disappears from an ecosystem, or water floods a city street, many systems can absorb a certain amount of disruption. But how badly does a single failure weaken the network? And how much damage can it take before it tips into collapse?

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Professor Emily Liu, a condensed matter physicist and nuclear engineer, has been named head of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

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Suvranu De, the J. Erik Jonsson ’22 Distinguished Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering (MANE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, has been selected to receive the 2022 ASME Edwin F. Church Medal.

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A predictive model of a polarized group, similar to the current U.S. Senate, demonstrates that when an outside threat – like war or a pandemic – fails to unite the group, the divide may be irreversible through democratic means.

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Just as convincing images of cats can be created using artificial intelligence, new proteins can now be made using similar tools.

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Martin A. Schmidt ’81 Ph.D., has been named the 19th President of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) by the Rensselaer Board of Trustees.

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People with type 2 diabetes who contract COVID-19 are nearly 50% more likely to wind up in intensive care if they have poorly managed their blood sugar levels over the long-term than those with better long-term glycemic control, according to a study using anonymized health care data.

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Eco Resilience Games from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has released the first augmented reality (AR) game focusing on the growing issue of harmful algae blooms.