Research Library

To build brain resilience and compete effectively, America needs to re-double its efforts to boost its domestic brain capital i.e., social, emotional, and cognitive resources.

Progress on the UN’s sustainable development goals — aimed at achieving peace and prosperity for all people and the planet — has been slow. However, fellow Harris A. Eyre and his co-authors explain how applying a brain capital framework could change the trajectory.

Is the electric grid ready for the era of decarbonization? Nonresident scholar Julie A. Cohn explains why new inverter technology could prove vital for preventing outages and grid instability.

Almost all of the progress the U.S. has made toward its Paris Agreement target for 2025 has come from falling CO2 emissions from energy use. But greater declines in other greenhouse gas emissions are needed to reach our goal, writes fellow Mark Finley.

"Decoupling” from China would come at the cost of American opportunity and influence, writes fellow Gabriel Collins. Instead, “de-risking” — loosening China’s grip on global supply chains without cutting ties entirely — would better serve American interests.

How can Texas secure an affordable, sustainable, and reliable power supply for all its citizens? This report explores key insights from research conducted at Rice University.

Are our views of sustainability becoming distorted by the often unsubstantiated “green” actions of companies and organizations? This brief explores why we urgently need a new framework for sustainability — one that relies on a holistic, cross-disciplinary, and multidimensional life cycle approach.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a gap in our ability to track and stop the spread of infectious diseases. With funding from the National Science Foundation, a Rice University research team is engineering bacteria to sustainably and continuously monitor wastewater for viruses.

The work of Katalin Karikó, 2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine recipient, laid a foundation for the development of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines that saved close to 20 million lives worldwide. But her discoveries almost did not happen, writes Alicia L. Johnson, a civic science postdoctoral associate at the Baker Institute Center for Health and Biosciences. Karikó’s story highlights the vital importance of supporting women in STEM.

As China appears ever closer to attempting a coercive annexation of Taiwan, this report explores how such a move could trigger a chain of nuclear proliferation — potentially adding thousands more warheads to stockpiles globally.