Stories

This AI Can Predict Future X-Rays

An AI system that can predict what a patient’s knee X-ray will look like a year in the future could transform how millions of people with osteoarthritis understand and manage their condition, according to research by the University of Surrey.

Artificial Tendons Give Muscle-Powered Robots a Boost

Our muscles are nature’s actuators. The sinewy tissue is what generates the forces that make our bodies move. In recent years, engineers have used real muscle tissue to actuate...

World’s Smallest Programmable, Autonomous Robots

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan have created the world’s smallest fully programmable, autonomous robots: microscopic swimming machines that can...

Bio-Hybrid Robots Turn Food Waste into Functional Machines

Although many roboticists today turn to nature to inspire their designs, even bioinspired robots are usually fabricated from non-biological materials like metal, plastic, and...

Building Bots on a Budget

Ph.D. student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, Yufeng Chi is part of a team of Berkeley engineers that has developed Berkeley Humanoid Lite, a low-cost, open-source robot made of...

H2-ICE Is Heating Up

Zero-carbon fuels are gaining momentum for hard-to-electrify mobility sectors as well as for stationary power generation. Hydrogen internal combustion engines are staking their claim as a future pathway for long-haul trucking, heavy off-highway machines, maritime vessels, and gensets. Test your knowledge about hydrogen combustion engines in this quiz.

SAE Media Group Acquires Aviation Carbon Event to Expand Aerospace Portfolio

SAE Media Group®, an SAE International company and a leading global provider of conferences and publications for aerospace, defense, and other critical industries, has announced its acquisition of Aviation Carbon, the specialist event platform dedicated to carbon reduction, sustainability, and decarbonization across the aviation industry.

Turning Edible Fungi into Organic Memristors

Researchers from The Ohio State University recently discovered that common edible fungi, such as shiitake mushrooms, can be grown and trained to act as organic memristors, a type of data processor that can remember past electrical states.

Rapidly Evaluating Heat Shield Materials

A team of engineers at Sandia National Laboratories has developed ways to rapidly evaluate new thermal protection (heat shield) materials for hypersonic vehicles.

Stanford Researchers Develop Flexible Color-Changing Material

Stanford researchers have developed a flexible material that can quickly change its surface texture and colors, offering potential applications in camouflage, art, robotics, and...

A New Tool for Measuring Femtosecond Lasers

Ultrashort laser pulses — that are shorter than a millionth of a millionth of a second — have transformed fundamental science, engineering and medicine. Despite this, their ultrashort duration...

NVIDIA Includes Ethernet Photonics in New Six-Chip AI Rubin Platform

NVIDIA is bringing Ethernet networking with co-packaged optics to artificial intelligence (AI) factories, enabling scale-out and scale-across on the NVIDIA Rubin platform...

How Much Do You Know About CAD?

How much do you know about CAD? Find out with this quiz.

Aerial Microrobots That Can Match a Bumblebee's Speed

MIT researchers have demonstrated aerial microrobots that can fly with speed and agility that is comparable to their biological counterparts.

Improved Safety, Durability, and Power: A Carbon-Based Battery Materials Breakthrough

This research demonstrates a new way to make carbon-based battery materials much safer, longer lasting, and more powerful by fundamentally redesigning how fullerene molecules are connected.

A Highly Accurate Simulator for Spray-Based Concrete 3D Printing

Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a fast, highly accurate simulator for spray-based concrete 3D printing that could enable stronger, more complex, and less wasteful construction by predicting how concrete behaves and solidifies, even around rebar.

Tech Briefs Wrapped 2025: Top 10 Technology Stories

As engineering continues to shape society and drive innovation, here are the year’s top 10 engineering stories that resonated most with Tech Briefs' audience.

Top 5 Videos of 2025

If you’re wondering which of our videos from 2025 were the most popular, wonder no more! We’ve put together a list below of the top 5 Tech Briefs videos.

Top 5 Tech Briefs Quizzes of 2025

Learn which of our little tests were the most popular this year. Find out which five quizzes topped our 2025 list. Thanks for yet another year of loyal readership; we appreciate your devotion to Tech Briefs. Happy Holidays!

VoxeLite: Helping Users Feel the Digital World

By combining high spatial resolution with a comfortable, wearable form factor, VoxeLite recreates touch sensations, which could transform how people interact with digital environments, including more immersive virtual reality systems, assistive technologies for people with vision impairments, human-robot interfaces, and enhanced touchscreens.

My Opinion: How about HI?

It’s a mistake to focus on AI without thinking about how it is used by the people working with it.

How Do Hydraulic Brakes Work?

If you’ve ridden in a modern car, bus, truck, aircraft, or even on certain bicycles, you’ve used hydraulic brakes. You most certainly have used them, but do you know how they work? Find out with this quiz.

2025 Holiday Gift Guide for Engineers: Tech, Tools, and Gadgets

We here at Tech Briefs want to remedy that toxic part of the holidays. So, we put together a list of terrific gift ideas for anyone — but especially the engineer — in your life.

Manufacturing the World's Tiniest Light-Emitting Diodes

Miniaturization ranks as the driving force behind the semiconductor industry. The tremendous gains in computer performance since the 1950s are largely due to the fact that ever smaller...

Scientists Create Superconducting Semiconductor Material

Scientists have long sought to make semiconductors that are also superconducting, thereby enhancing their speed and energy efficiency and enabling new quantum technologies. However,...

New Cooling Technique Could Make Computer Chips More Powerful

As more devices get piled onto computer chips to increase processing power capacity, heat generation becomes increasingly concentrated. This heat must be removed to keep chip...

An Electronic Fiber for Stretchable Sensing

The phrase ‘liquid metal’ may bring to mind something hazardous, like mercury or molten steel. But in the Laboratory of Photonic Materials and Fiber Devices (FIMAP) in EPFL’s School of...

Revolutionizing the Production of Semiconductor Chips

Engineers at The University of Texas at Austin are leading an academic and industry all-star team that aims to revolutionize the production of semiconductor chips with a new 3D printing method.

Artemis II Mission Launch

As 2026 nears, NASA continues moving forward to launching Artemis II, the first crewed mission under the Artemis campaign, no later than April next year. Test your knowledge about the mission in this quiz.