Q&A

Q&A: Charge Wirelessly as You Drive

A new system from Oak Ridge National Laboratory enables electric vehicles to be charged while on the road.

Q&A: Underwater Smart Glue Turns On and Off

An adhesive can be deactivated by applying a small voltage.

Q&A: Tactile Robot Finger with No Blind Spots

A robotic finger has a sense of touch that can be localized with high precision over a large, multi-curved surface.

Q&A: Turning Trash into Valuable Graphene

A new process will reduce the cost of manufacturing graphene by a factor of more than 100.

Q&A: Simple Solar-Powered Desalination

Lenan Zhang and his team at MIT developed a small, economical, highly efficient device to provide fresh drinking water using only the Sun for its energy input.

Q&A: Solid Silk - A Biocompatible, Sustainable, Degradable Building Block

David Kaplan is solidifying silk to make products like rods and plates for medical implants.

Q&A: Electrically Conductive Coated Yarn for Wearable, Washable Fabrics

Drexel Professor Genevieve Dion is coating yarn with the highly conductive, two-dimensional material MXene.

Q&A: A Shape-Morphing, Self-Healing Soft Composite

Have you heard of "Thubber?"

Q&A: Refrigeration by Twisting Fibers

Changing directions of twist and coiling changes whether a material cools or heats.

Q&A: Innovative Linear Electrostatic MEMS Actuator

Sherry Towfighian and her team made a big improvement on how microphones are manufactured.

Q&A: Wearable Motion Sensors Could Save Unborn Babies

Professor Negar Tavassolian is using vibration sensors to monitor heartbeats.

Q&A: A Circulatory System for Robots

Robert F. Shepherd is Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is leading a team exploring the use of hydraulic fluids in soft robots to also serve...

Q&A: “Neural Lander” Uses AI to Land Drones Smoothly

Soon-Jo Chung is Bren Professor of Aerospace in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (EAS) at Caltech and research scientist at Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He and his team...

Q&A: Power Anomalies Detect Malware in Embedded Systems

Aydin Aysu, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he helped develop a technique for...

Q&A: 3D-Printed Hydrogel Blocks Can Aid Robotics and Diagnostics

Ian Y. Wong, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Engineering, Molecular Pharmacology, Physiology and Biotechnology at Brown University in Providence, RI. He and colleagues have...

Q&A: NASA's Dr. Mahmooda Sultana Makes Multifunctional Sensors

Dr. Sultana won funding to advance a nanomaterial-based detector platform that can sense environmental parameters from minute concentrations of target gases and vapors, to...

Q&A: Texas A&M's Jaime Grunlan Creates a Non-Toxic Flame-Retardant Coating

Texas A&M professor Jaime Grunlan and his team are developing a new flame-retardant coating using renewable, nontoxic materials readily found in nature that could...

Q&A: Harvard's Siyi Xu Designs All-New Strain and Force Sensors

Working with teams from Harvard, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Boston Children's Hospital, Siyi Xu developed a soft, non-toxic, wearable sensor that attaches to the...

Q&A: Columbia University’s Jyotirmoy Mandal Creates a Cooling Polymer

Mandal, along with Professors Yuan Yang and Nanfang Yu, built upon earlier work demonstrating that many simple plastics and polymers are excellent heat radiators that could...

Q&A: University of Utah’s Robby Bowles 3D-Prints Cells to Produce Human Tissue

Professor Bowles has developed a method to 3D-print cells to produce human tissue. This replacement tissue can greatly improve the recovery of a person with a...

Q&A: Rice University's Rouzbeh Shahsavari Creates a Stronger, Lighter Cement

Professor Shahsavari and graduate student Sung Hoon have demonstrated a process for producing a cement that is stronger, lighter, and more durable than the traditional...

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 of...

Q&A: UCSD's Sheng Xu Builds a Stretchable Health-Monitoring Patch

A team led by UCSD has built a stretchable electronic patch that can be worn on the skin like a bandage and used to wirelessly monitor a variety of physical and electrical...

Q&A: NYU's Dr. André D. Taylor Shows Pathway for Perovskite Cells

An international team of university researchers, led by Dr. Taylor, reports solving a major fabrication challenge for perovskite cells — the intriguing potential challengers...

Q&A: Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Sara Abdollahi Optimizes Soft-Material 3D Printing

Researchers in Carnegie Mellon University's College of Engineering have developed a novel approach to optimizing soft-material 3D printing. The Expert-Guided...

Q&A: MIT's Dr. Yanfei Xu Transforms Heat Insulators into Heat Conductors

Plastics are excellent thermal insulators — a quality that can be an advantage in some applications. But this property is less desirable in products such as plastic...

Q&A: OSU's Uranbileg Daalkhaijav Researches How to Rapidly Manufacture Soft Robots

Researchers at Oregon State University’s College of Engineering have taken an important step toward the rapid manufacture of stretchable electronic devices,...

Q&A: Brookhaven's Dr. Yimei Zhu Observes How Lithium Moves Inside Batteries

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have observed how lithium moves inside individual nanoparticles that make up batteries. The finding could help companies...

Q&A: Dr. Abhaya Datye Creates a More Powerful Emission-Control Catalyst

Researchers at Washington State University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of New Mexico have created a catalyst capable of reducing pollutants...