Throughout January, Miracle Mile Shops at Planet Hollywood hotel-casino will collect donations for Las Vegas Business Academy in honor of National Mentoring Month.

On most class projects, students are concerned with their grade. At the Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition, engineering students at UNLV also are concerned with winning cash and maybe even getting their project on the market.

Less than two weeks from graduation, some UNLV students seem a bit more prepared for taking on the challenges of the real world.

UNLV received a $1.4 million federal grant to research the design, construction and maintenance of future high-speed rail projects, U.S. Sen Harry Reid, D-Nevada, and Rep. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, announced on Thursday.

UNLV is set to receive up to $5 million to help develop space exploration technology, the university announced today. The deal between the university’s Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin will last five years, UNLV said in a statement.

Soft robots have become an area of interest due to the fact that they would make possible tasks and environments previously unachievable by traditional and rigid robotic systems. For example, soft robots could get around in rough terrain or engage in more physical contact with the human body.

“Eat right” — it’s usually one of the first bits of advice doled out to any dieter.

But counting every calorie and tracking grams of sugar and fat in a diet can be a hassle, one many dieters put off or avoid entirely.

Every January, the modern-day Masters of the Universe flock to the Strip. From Wall Street and Silicon Valley they come for CES, where the Fetty Waps of the world play Google after-parties, and heavyweights from Intel to IBM showcase the future’s infrastructure. It’s the biggest trade show in a city of trade shows.

Officials in Nevada say they see broad horizons for the unmanned aerial systems industry following the posting of federal aviation rules designed for small drone aircraft.

Nevada is at the forefront of pushing the national unmanned aircraft system or drone industry forward.

Thanks to the use of an electroactive polymer, the material could make prostheses much more flexible and can even be handled by external electronic means.

Making sense of big data is often likened to finding a needle in a haystack. But a dean at UNLV’s engineering college says he’s improved the analogy. Organizing big data is more like finding one-tenth of a needle in a haystack, argues Rama Venkat, head of the Howard R. Hughes College of Engineering. “(And) there are not enough scientists to figure out what is in it,” he said.