Photonic Communication Comes to Computer Chips

With novel optoelectronic chips and a new partnership with a top silicon-chip manufacturer, MIT spinout Ayar Labs aims to increase speed and reduce energy consumption in computing, starting with...

New Camera Gives Surgeons a Butterfly's-Eye View of Cancer

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Washington University in St. Louis have developed a surgical camera inspired by the eye of the morpho butterfly. The...

Shrimp-Inspired Camera May Enable Underwater Navigation

The underwater environment may appear to the human eye as a dull-blue, featureless space. However, a vast landscape of polarization patterns appear when viewed through a camera that is...

Custom Optomechanics in Industrial UV Lasers

Reliability and longevity directly impact the cost of using Q-switched, diode pumped, solid state, ultraviolet lasers in industrial applications. Damage to the intracavity harmonic crystal is...

Novel Optics for Ultrafast Cameras Create New Possibilities for Imaging

MIT researchers have developed novel photography optics that capture images based on the timing of reflecting light inside the optics instead of the traditional approach...

Ray Optics Simulation of Inertial Navigation Systems

Attitude detection is a crucial element in aircraft and spacecraft navigation. The motion of an aircraft consists of a translational component (motion of its center of mass with respect to...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Electronics/Sensors/IOT Category Winner

FUTURE ANTENNA MINIATURIZATION MECHANISM: MAGNETOELECTRIC ANTENNAS Hwaider Lin and Nian-Xiang Sun, Northeastern University, Boston, MA USA

Antenna...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Grand Prize Winner

INVISIBLE GLASS

Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) has developed a method for creating surface nanotextures that effectively...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Medical Category Winner

IMPLANTABLE SENSOR TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM FOR ADVANCED PROSTHETIC CONTROL

The Implantable Myoelectric Sensor (IMES) system transmits localized myoelectric signals...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Robotics/Automation/Manufacturing Category Winner

DON’T MELT. MELD.™

The MELD™ technology enables additive manufacturing (AM) of metals. This patented process is unique because there is no...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Aerospace & Defense Category Winner

DETECTING PLASTIC LANDMINES

Hidden PFM-1 anti-personnel landmines are unexploded ordnance (UXO) devices that pose a difficult challenge to conventional...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Automotive/Transportation Category Winner

ISCAD — ELECTRICAL DRIVE WITH 0% RARE EARTHS, 25% HIGHER DRIVING RANGE, AND 100% SAFETY

Conventional electrical machines suffer from the problem...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Consumer Products Category Winner

ALUMINUM-POWERED ELECTRICITY GENERATION

Aluminum has an incredibly high energy density — double that of gasoline and an order of magnitude greater than...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest: Sustainable Technologies Category Winner

AEROGELS FROM ENVIRONMENTAL WASTES FOR NOVEL ENGINEERING APPLICATIONS Associate Prof. Hai Minh Duong and Prof. Nhan Phan-Thien, National University of Singapore...

Method Enables Electronic Components to be Printed Like Newspapers

Cellphones, laptops, tablets, and many other electronics rely on their internal metallic circuits to process information at high speed. Current metal fabrication techniques...

Aerogel Insulation Makes Thinner, Warmer Outerwear

Spinoff is NASA's annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and services in the fields...

Nano-Additives Increase the Service Life of Concrete

A new method increases the service life of concrete structures by reducing the infiltration rates of deleterious ions. The key is a nano-sized additive that slows down penetration of...

5 Ws of the SAFIRE Lithium-Ion Battery

Who

The Safe Impact Resistant Electrolyte (SAFIRE) fire-resistant battery can be used in consumer electronics such as cellphones, in drones and cars, and in soldiers’ packs.

Smart Sensor Technology for the IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) applications — whether for city infrastructures, factories, or wearable devices — use large arrays of sensors collecting data for transmission over the Internet to a central,...

2018 Create the Future Design Contest Special Awards Section

The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 by Tech Briefs Media Group (publishers of Tech Briefs magazine) to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. Since...

Self-Healing Metal Oxides for Corrosion Protection

Most metals, with the notable exception of gold, tend to oxidize when exposed to air and water. This reaction — which produces rust on iron, tarnish on silver, and verdigris on copper or...

Products of Tomorrow: November 2018

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that...

New on the Market: November 2018

Thermography Systems

Advanced Thermal Solutions, Norwood, MA, announced the tvLYT^™ liquid crystal thermography system that provides a portable solution for temperature measurement of...

Energy-Storing Material Folds Onto Itself

Eagles can store energy in their feet without having to continuously contract their muscles to then jump high or hold on to prey. New materials have been created that can store energy this way. The...

Super-Resolution Image Reconstruction (SRIR)

Many low-cost sensors (or cameras) may spatially or electronically under-sample an image. Similarly, cameras taking pictures from great distances, such as aerial photos, may not obtain detailed...

Machine Learning Method Detects Heart Disease

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the U.S., one in every four deaths is a result of heart...

Method Trains Robots to Collaborate Through Demonstration

Robots that are adapted to respond to physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) traditionally treat such interactions as disturbances, and resume their original behaviors when the...

Cell-Sized Robots Sense Their Environment

Colloids — insoluble particles or molecules anywhere from a billionth to a millionth of a meter across — are so small they can stay suspended indefinitely in a liquid or even in air. Robots about...

Inorganic Compound for Use in Quantum Computing

Quantum computers will be able to solve problems well beyond the reach of existing computers while working much faster and consuming vastly less energy. An inorganic compound was developed that...

Q&A: University of Virginia’s Patrick Hopkins Studies How to Regulate a Material’s Thermal Conductivity

Professor Hopkins and University of Virginia colleagues — in collaboration with materials scientists at Penn State, the University...

One-Dimensional Material with High Current Density

Current density is the amount of electrical current per cross-sectional area at a given point. As transistors in integrated circuits become smaller and smaller, they need higher and higher...

Facility Focus: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL, Liver-more, CA) was established in 1952 at the height of the Cold War to meet urgent national security needs by advancing nuclear weapons...

Retinal Prosthesis Stimulates Nerve Cells

Fabricated using inexpensive and widely available organic pigments used in printing inks and cosmetics, an artificial retina was developed that consists of tiny pixels like a digital camera sensor on...

Ultra-Thin Camera Creates Images Without Lenses

Traditional cameras — even those on the thinnest cellphones — cannot be truly flat due to their optics. The lenses require a certain shape and size in order to function. A new camera design...

Two-Dimensional Semiconductor Materials Created Using Artificial “Superlattices”

One current method to build a semiconductor superlattice — materials comprised of alternating layers of ultra-thin, two-dimensional sheets only one or a...

Product of the Month: November 2018

COMSOL, Burlington, MA, introduced COMSOL Multiphysics^® version 5.4 that features the new COMSOL Compiler™ for creating standalone simulation applications and digital twins for the...

On-Chip Optical Filter Processes Wide Range of Light Wavelengths

MIT researchers have designed an optical filter on a chip that can process optical signals from across an extremely wide spectrum of light at once, something never before...

Simplifying Access to High Energy Sub-5-fs Pulses

In order to make ultrafast pulses accessible to the broadest possible field of applications, Coherent has been implementing a comprehensive program of design methodologies, materials...

New Products: November 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

Optical Monitoring System

The SpectraLock Optical Monitoring System from Eddy Company (Apple Valley, CA) provides in-situ monitoring and deposition rate control to produce...

Next-Generation Photodetector Camera to Deploy During Robotic Servicing Demonstration Mission

An advanced, highly compact thermal camera that traces its heritage to one now flying on NASA's Landsat 8 has been mounted in a corner of NASA's...

Imaging Innovation for Spinal Care

Motion capture (Mocap) is a technique used in the film industry to digitally track a human actor's movements and precisely transfer those motions to an animated figure. But it has other applications as...

Inside Story: S. Himmelstein and Company

S. Himmelstein and Company (Hoffman Estates, IL) has been designing and manufacturing torque measurement transducers and instrumentation since 1960. The company’s products offer significant...

Answering Your Questions: For an Electric-Aircraft Future, Do We Need to Rethink Design?

For an electric-aircraft future, it's not enough to just change components. You have to rethink design, our expert tells one reader.

Modular Robots Change Shape – Depending on the Task

Professor Hadas Kress-Gazit tells Tech Briefs about the "great promise" of autonomous modular robots.

New Products: November 2018 Photonics & Imaging Insider

Telecentric Lenses

Edmund Optics (EO) (Barrington, NJ) has introduced TECHSPEC® MercuryTL™ Liquid Lens Telecentric Lenses. These integrated lenses utilize the unique...

Solar Cell Does Double Duty for Renewable Energy

In the quest for abundant, renewable alternatives to fossil fuels, scientists have sought to harvest the sun’s energy through “water splitting,” an artificial photosynthesis...

Invention Opens Door to Safer, Less Expensive X-Ray Imaging

New lead halide perovskite nanocrystals developed by researchers from NUS Chemistry could soon mean cheaper X-rays and computerized tomography (CT) scans involving lower levels...

Laser-Activated Silk Sealants Outperform Sutures for Tissue Repair

Tissue repair following injury or during surgery is conventionally performed with sutures and staples, which can cause tissue damage and complications, including...

Enabling “Internet of Photonic Things” with Miniature Sensors

A team of researchers at Washington University in St. Louis was the first to successfully record environmental data using a wireless photonic sensor resonator with a...

A Step Toward Personalized, Automated Smart Homes

Developing automated systems that track occupants and self-adapt to their preferences is a major next step for the future of smart homes. When you walk into a room, for instance, a system...

Light it up: Purdue NSF-funded Technology Flips the Switch on the Future for Sustainable Smart Homes and $1.3 Trillion Market

IoT devices need a wireless means of communications to be truly seamless so they can be easily integrated in...

Researchers Convert Plastic Bottles into Aerogels that Insulate and Absorb

Researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) are trying to solve the problem of plastic waste by converting it into something useful: Aerogels.

Answering Your Questions: How Good are Automotive Sensor Simulation Models?

A reader asks our industry experts: "How good are the simulation models for automotive ADAS sensors?"

IoT Security Toolkit

Icon Labs (West Des Moines, IA) recently announced its Floodgate IoT Security Toolkit. The solution enables IoT edge devices to be easily and securely integrated with IoT cloud platforms, including Verizon’s ThingSpace...

New Metal-Air Battery Design Offers a Potential Boost to Electric Vehicles

Professor Hart spoke with Tech Briefs about why his team's new battery may someday find its way beyond niche applications and into electric vehicles.

Here's an Idea: Garbage!

In this episode of Here’s an Idea™, we talk with researchers who are finding small — and sometimes even fun — ways to take out all the trash.

After a Successful Landing, What’s Next for the InSight Mission?

InSight project manager Tom Hoffman spoke with Tech Briefs about the importance of digging deep in our knowledge of Mars.

Plane Flies with No Moving Parts

Since the first airplane took flight, virtually every aircraft has flown with the help of moving parts such as propellers, turbine blades, or fans that produce a persistent, whining buzz. MIT has built...

Answering Your Questions: How Long Should a Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) Take?

An FMEA provides a step-by-step way of identifying product failures. Carl Carlson explains just how long the process takes.