INSIDER

Solar-Powered Solutions on the Farm: A Microgrid for Crop Production

A newly completed solar microgrid system near Greensburg, Indiana, in Decatur County, is expected to generate enough emissions-free clean energy to offset nearly 4000...

New Techno-Economic Model Optimizes Waste-Heat Conversion Technologies

Every year, 50 percent of the energy produced worldwide from coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear, and renewable energy sources is lost as heat. This untapped resource...

Ultrathin Solar Cells Get a Boost

Using ultrabright X-rays from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, a team of researchers led by Rice University has determined that sunlight itself can improve the efficiency of 2D...

Microgrids are a Key to Grid Resiliency

The aging energy grid is being pushed to the breaking point. Power outages from extreme weather alone cost anywhere from $2 billion to $77 billion per year. And some isolated communities still rely...

The James Webb Space Telescope Successfuly Launches

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope successfully launched on December 25 on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, South America. A joint effort with ESA...

Fundamental Particles Modelled in Beam of Light

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have succeeded in creating an experimental model of an elusive kind of fundamental particle called a skyrmion in a beam of light. The breakthrough...

New Products: January 2022 Photonics & Imaging Insider

Shortwave Infrared (SWIR) QVGA Camera

Attollo Engineering (Camarillo, CA) has introduced a quarter-VGA format camera (320 x 256 resolution), based on indium gallium arsenide...

Testing Sensors in Fog to Make Future Transportation Safer

Self-flying drones and autonomous taxis that can safely operate in fog may sound futuristic, but new research at Sandia National Laboratories’ fog facility is bringing the...

CMU's Iris Rover Secured to Lunar Lander

Carnegie Mellon University's Iris rover is bolted in and ready for its journey to the moon.

Personalized Exosuit for Real-World Walking

People rarely walk at a constant speed and a single incline. We change speed when rushing to the next appointment, catching a crosswalk signal, or going for a casual stroll in the park. Slopes...

Tractor Efficiency Increased, Thanks to Hydraulics Research

Modern agricultural tractors contain so much cutting-edge technology, they rival even the latest spacecraft. But the back end is still old-school, relying largely on fossil...

LEONARDO, a Bipedal Robot, Can Ride a Skateboard and Walk a Slackline

Researchers at Caltech have built a bipedal robot that combines walking with flying to create a new type of locomotion, making it exceptionally nimble and capable of...

Sensitive New Way of Detecting Transistor Defects

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and collaborators have devised and tested a highly sensitive method of detecting and counting defects in...

Comb Breathalyzer — Thousandfold More Sensitive to Disease Biomarkers

JILA scientists have boosted the sensitivity of their decade-old frequency comb breathalyzer a thousandfold, enabling it to detect additional biomarkers of disease...

Layers of Crystalline Nanosheets Enable Tunable Electronic Properties

Boron is a versatile non-metal element, but until the last five years, chemists have only theorized about the useful properties and applications of two-dimensional...

Paving the Way for UV-Enabled Flexible Wearable Tech

To enable the development of wearable devices that possess advanced ultraviolet (UV) detection functions, scientists from NTU Singapore have created a new type of light sensor that is...

Researchers Determine Optimum Pressure to Improve the Performance of Lithium Metal Batteries

A team of materials scientists and chemists has determined the proper stack pressure that lithium metal batteries, or LMBs, need to be subjected...

Compact Medium-Voltage Converters Enable Advanced Grid Architectures and Operations

As we trend toward more renewables and distributed energy resources (DERs), the design of the electric distribution system itself imposes physical...

Prize-Winning Technology for Large-Scale Energy Storage

Safe, cheap, and sustainable technology for energy storage has been developed at the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University (LiU). It is based on two major...

High-Performance Mxene Electrodes for Next-Generation Powerful Battery

Scientists from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has recently developed battery-like electrochemical Nb2CTx MXene electrodes.

Non-Contact Tip/Tilt Sensor

NASA Kennedy Space Center developed the Inductive Non-Contact Position Sensor for motion control applications. The sensor was designed to monitor the precise movements of an optical inspection system that...

Autonomous Robot Opens Doors, Finds Wall Outlets

University of Cincinnati researchers developed an autonomous robot that can open a door for itself. It uses an appendage on a simple motorized lift the robot can raise and lower to reach a...

Dexterous Robotic Hands Manipulate Thousands of Objects

A robotic hand system was developed at MIT that can reorient over 2,000 diverse objects with a hand facing both upward and downward, in a step toward more human-like manipulation....

Personalized Exosuit Provides Customized Assistance

Researchers from Harvard University developed a new approach in which robotic exosuit assistance can be calibrated to an individual and adapt to a variety of real-world walking tasks in...

Autonomous Robotic Rover Helps Monitor Climate Change

An autonomous robotic rover, Benthic Rover II, has provided new insight into life 13,100 feet beneath the surface of the ocean. The data collected are fundamental to understanding the...

Metal-Halide Perovskite Semiconductors Compete with SilicMetal-Halide Perovskite Semiconductors Compete with Silicon Counterparts for Solar Cells, LEDson Counterparts for Solar Cells, LEDs

Climate change and its consequences are becoming...

NASA’s Webb Will Join Forces with Event Horizon Telescope to Reveal Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

On isolated mountaintops across the planet, scientists await word that tonight is the night. The complex coordination between...

New Products: November 2021 Photonics & Imaging Insider

Time-of-Flight Camera

LUCID Vision Labs, Inc. (Richmond, BC, Canada) recently announced its new Helios™2+ 3D Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera offering two new on-camera depth...

Seeing the World Through Different Eyes

Infrared (IR) light is invisible to humans. However, some animals, such as rattlesnakes or bloodsucking bats, can perceive IR radiation and use it to find food. But even for humans, the ability to...