INSIDER

Sandia Helps Puerto Rico Grid Resilience with Microgrid Designs

The days and weeks following a natural disaster are a critical time for residents, emergency response teams, and government entities to recover and rebuild infrastructure....

Artificial Intelligence Could Help Data Centers Run Far More Efficiently

A novel system developed by MIT researchers automatically “learns” how to schedule data-processing operations across thousands of servers — a task traditionally...

New Power Supply Control Method Significantly Increases the Service Life of End Devices

From the charging unit for a smartphone to the power supply of a laptop or washing machine to LED lights or the charging station for an electric car —...

A New Electrolyte for Lithium-Metal Batteries

Improvements to a class of battery electrolyte first introduced in 2017 — liquefied gas electrolytes — could pave the way to a high-impact and long-sought advance for rechargeable batteries:...

Wearable Motion Sensors Could Save Unborn Babies

A technique was developed that could allow expectant parents to hear their baby’s heartbeat continuously at home with a non-invasive and safe device that is potentially more accurate than any...

Mini Stretchable Pump for Soft Robots

Most soft robots are actuated by rigid, noisy pumps that push fluids into the machines’ moving parts. Because they are connected to these bulky pumps by tubes, these robots have limited autonomy and...

Scientists Have Visualized the Electronic Structure in a Microelectronic Device

Scientists have visualized the electronic structure in a microelectronic device for the first time, opening up opportunities for finely tuned, high-performance...

Convert Power Faster and More Efficiently

University of Illinois electrical engineers have used beta-gallium oxide to clear another hurdle in high-power semiconductor fabrication. Beta-gallium oxide is readily available and promises to...

New Sensor Network Reveals Telltale Patterns in Neighborhood Air Quality

Black carbon, commonly known as soot, is a significant contributor to global warming and is strongly linked to adverse health outcomes. Produced by the incomplete...

Tiny Laser is an Important Step Toward New Sensors

In a major step toward developing portable scanners that can rapidly measure molecules in pharmaceuticals or classify tissue in patients’ skin, researchers have created an imaging system...

Tiny “Walking” Motor Made with Five Parts

A new approach developed at MIT to building robots is based on a set of five millimeter-scale components, all of which can be attached to each other by a standard connector. Using this simple...

MEMS Accelerometer Begins with Multi-Layer Metal Structures

A high-sensitivity and low-noise MEMS accelerometer was developed using multi-layer metal structures composed of multiple metal layers. The accelerometer achieves 1 µG level...

Using Light Waves to Enable Ultrafast Quantum Computing

Jigang Wang patiently explained his latest discovery in quantum control that could lead to superfast computing based on quantum mechanics. He mentioned light-induced superconductivity...

How to Bend Light Waves in the Right Place

In free space, the light wave of a laser beam spreads on an exactly straight line. Under certain circumstances, however, a much more complicated behavior occurs. If the movement of the wave is...

Russian Engineers Prepare to ‘Light Up’ a Lamp Revolution

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences have designed and tested a prototype...

Tool Tells Robots Where Nearby Humans are Headed

On a factory floor, robots are programmed to stop momentarily if a person passes by. The robot often freezes in place long before a person crosses its path. While robots can predict where a...

Flexible Generators Turn Movement into Energy

Wearable devices that harvest energy from movement are not a new idea, but a material created at Rice University may make them more practical.

Release of Solar Panel Dataset Helps Cities Make Power Grids Safer and More Reliable

Solar power researchers have traditionally only used the power measurements from single residential solar photovoltaic (PV) systems to estimate the power...

Clean Fuel Cells Could Be Cheap Enough to Replace Gas Engines in Vehicles

Advancements in zero-emission fuel cells could make the technology cheap enough to replace traditional gasoline engines in vehicles, according to researchers at the...

Winter Could Pose Solar Farm ‘Ramping’ Problem for Power Grid

By adding utility-scale solar farms throughout New York state, summer electricity demand from conventional sources could be reduced by up to 9.6% in some places. But Cornell...

Increase Processing Capacity Without Adding Transistors

Computers and similar electronic devices have gotten faster and smaller over the decades as computer-chip makers have learned how to shrink individual transistors. Scientists’...

Breakthrough in Stretchable Electronics

With a wide range of healthcare, energy, and military applications, stretchable electronics are valued for their ability to be compressed, twisted and conformed to uneven surfaces without losing...

Building Animal-Inspired Sensors into the Shells of Aircraft, Cars

What if drones and self-driving cars had the tingling “spidey senses” of Spider-Man? They might actually detect and avoid objects better because they would process...

A Washable Sensor Can Be Woven into Material

Researchers at University of British Columbia Okanagan’s School of Engineering have developed a low-cost sensor that can be interlaced into textiles and composite materials. While the research...

Changing How Sound Moves Particles

Researchers at Aalto University have discovered a surprising phenomenon that changes how we think about how sound can move particles. Their experiment is based on an experiment in which particles move on a...

“Knitting” Soft Actuators

Carnegie Mellon University researchers used computationally controlled knitting machines to create knitted objects that are actuated by tendons. The objects emerge from the knitting machines in their desired...

Chirality Yields Colossal Photocurrent

An international team led by a group of Boston College researchers reported that a recently discovered Weyl semimetal delivers the largest intrinsic conversion of light to electricity of any material....

Researchers 3D Print Metamaterials with Novel Optical Properties

A team of engineers at Tufts University has developed a series of 3D printed metamaterials with unique microwave or optical properties that go beyond what is possible using...

Ghostly X-Ray Images Could Assist in Analyzing X-Ray Laser Experiments

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) produce incredibly powerful beams of light that enable unprecedented studies of the ultrafast motions of atoms in matter. To interpret...