Products of Tomorrow

Self-Repairing Adhesive Glass

Researchers from Tel Aviv University have created a new type of glass with unique and even contradictory properties, such as being a strong adhesive and incredibly transparent at the same time. Amino acids and peptides have a natural tendency to connect to each other and form ordered structures with a defined periodic arrangement, but during their research, the team discovered a unique peptide that behaves differently from anything they knew: it didn’t form any ordered pattern but an amorphous, disordered one, that describes glass. The glass, which forms spontaneously when it comes in contact with water at room temperature, could bring about a revolution in an array of different and diverse industries such as optics and electro-optics, satellite communication, remote sensing, and biomedicine.

Contact: Noga Shahar
972-547-705-223
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Active Turbulence Suppression System

NASA Ames researchers have developed a novel approach for actively controlling Dutch-roll oscillations of an eVTOL aircraft by using existing outboard propellers to dampen oscillations. The technology avoids the need to add hardware or change the design of eVTOL vehicles to address the negative effects of turbulence. The Active Turbulence Suppression (ATS) system for eVTOL vehicles employs existing lifting propellers to dampen instabilities during flight, such as Dutch-roll oscillations and other gust-induced oscillations. When a roll angle of an eVTOL aircraft has deviated or is about to deviate from a current stable aircraft state to an undesirable, unstable, and oscillating aircraft state, the ATS system queries a turbulence suppression database that stores a set of propeller speed profiles for mitigation a deviation of a given roll angle for a particular aircraft with specified propellers. Using this data, the eVTOL flight controller adjusts the speed of the propellers.

Contact: NASA’s Licensing Concierge
202-358-7432
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Chip-Scale Titanium-Sapphire Laser

Ti:sapphire lasers have never achieved the broad, real-world adoption they deserve — until now. In a dramatic leap forward in scale, efficiency, and cost, researchers at Stanford University have produced the world’s first practical titanium-sapphire laser on a chip, democratizing a once-exclusive technology. The prototype is four orders of magnitude smaller (10,000×) and three orders less expensive (1,000×) than any Ti:sapphire laser ever produced. The new Ti:sapphire laser fits on a chip that is measured in square millimeters. If the researchers can mass-produce them on wafers, potentially thousands, perhaps tens-of-thousands of Ti:sapphire lasers could be squeezed on a disc that fits in the palm of a human hand. The research team is excited about the range of fields that such a laser might impact including quantum physics, neuroscience, and ophthalmology.