Restoring Mobility and Freedom with a Wearable Robotic Device

An assistive robotic device can provide at-home therapy and also enable independence on everyday tasks.

My Opinion: Quantum Computing Is Coming But Has This Engineer Puzzled

My Opinion: Quantum computing is coming but has this engineer puzzled. As we celebrate 2025, the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, I find that thinking about these things from an engineer’s point of view is quite challenging.

Substrate Engineering to Improve Power Electronics

As the growth in global electricity need and supply continues to accelerate, efficient power electronics will be key to improving grid efficiency, stability, integration, and resilience for...

Superconducting Diode Bridge Efficiently Converts AC to DC for Quantum Circuits

Superconductivity is an advantageous property observed in some materials. It entails an electrical resistance of zero at extremely low temperatures....

Hardening the Grid: Research Team Focuses on Quake Proofing Transformer Bushings

The electric grid we take for granted involves large, expensive equipment, most notably power transformers. If one goes down, it can take more than a year to...

Diamond Quantum Imaging Can Enable Next-Gen Power Electronics

Improving energy conversion efficiency in power electronics is vital for a sustainable society, with wide-bandgap semiconductors like GaN and SiC power devices offering...

World's First Petahertz-Speed Phototransistor in Ambient Conditions

What if ultrafast pulses of light could operate computers at speeds a million times faster than today's best processors? A team of scientists, including researchers from...

Advanced Microelectronics: Why A Next-Gen Semiconductor Doesn’t Fall to Pieces

The mechanism holding new ferroelectric semiconductors together produces a conductive pathway that could enable high power transistors. A new class of...

Soft Robot Can Carry Cargo Up and Down Steep Aerial Wires

Researchers have created a light-powered soft robot that can carry loads through the air along established tracks, similar to cable cars or aerial trams. The soft robot operates...

New Atom-Based Thermometer Measures Temperature More Accurately

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a new thermometer using atoms boosted to such high energy levels that they are a thousand...

AI and Humans as Teammates

Duke University Professor Boyuan Chen and his team have developed a platform called CREW that is used to create algorithms to optimize human-AI cooperation.

Neuromorphic Semiconductor Chip Learns and Corrects Itself

Existing computer systems have separate data processing and storage devices, making them inefficient for processing complex data like AI. A Korea Advanced Institute of Science and...

A New Home for Sustainability Robotics

The world is currently facing significant environmental challenges and complex demands related to infrastructure and natural ecosystems. To address these issues, viable solutions that are both...

Unique Nanodisk Holds Major Potential for Future of Photonic Research

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have for the first time succeeded in combining two major research fields in photonics by creating a nanoobject with...

AI Advances Heart Research

A promising way to study disease and test new drugs is to use cellular and engineered tissue models in a dish, but existing methods to study heart cell contraction and calcium handling require a good deal of manual work, are prone to errors, and need expensive specialized equipment. Researchers at Columbia Engineering unveiled a groundbreaking new tool today that addresses these challenges head-on: BeatProfiler.

Improved GaN-Based Semiconductor Devices for Power Electronics

A study led by Nagoya University in Japan revealed that a simple thermal reaction of gallium nitride (GaN) with metallic magnesium (Mg) results in the formation of a distinctive...

New Dual-Armed Telerobotic System for Hazardous Waste Clean-Up

Because they can go where humans can’t, robots are especially suited for safely working with hazardous nuclear waste. But first, those robots need to become like the humans...

Recreating ‘Star Trek’ Virtual Environments

A system for generating interactive 3D environments, Holodeck generates a virtually limitless range of indoor environments, using AI to interpret users’ requests.

Jet-Propelled Sea Creatures Could Improve Ocean Robotics

Scientists at the University of Oregon have discovered that colonies of gelatinous sea animals swim through the ocean in giant corkscrew shapes using coordinated jet propulsion, an...

Giving Household Robots Common Sense

Whereas prior works have focused on leveraging LLMs directly for planning in symbolic spaces, this work uses LLMs to guide the search of task structures and constraints implicit in multi-step physical demonstrations.

Flexible “Skeletons” for Soft, Muscle-Powered Robots

Our muscles are nature’s perfect actuators — devices that turn energy into motion. For their size, muscle fibers are more powerful and precise than most synthetic actuators. They...

How To Shift Gears in a Molecular Motor

Scientists have long strived to develop artificial molecular motors that can convert energy into directed motion. Researchers at Linköping University have now presented a solution to a challenging...

An Electrifying Improvement in Copper Conductivity

A common carbon compound is enabling remarkable performance enhancements when mixed in just the right proportion with copper to make electrical wires. It’s a phenomenon that defies...

My Opinion: We Need Humans in the Loop

With all the chatter these days about AI, it’s important to really understand what it is and how to use it. A project at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is exploring how operators and an AI automated control system interact.

Are Shapeshifting “Soft Machines” In Our Future?

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have furthered a new type of soft material that can change shape in response to light, a discovery that could advance “soft...

Scientists Design a Two-Legged Robot Powered by Muscle Tissue

Compared to robots, human bodies are more flexible, capable of fine movements, and can efficiently convert energy into movement. Drawing inspiration from human gait, researchers...