Stories

A team of researchers from Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal in Canada has focused on making soft versions of multitouch screens, batteries, microchip transistors, and other electronics. Those technologies could lead to "smart clothing" that, for example, monitors a person's health signs, or even...

A technique for inducing nanorods – rod-shaped semiconductor nanocrystals – to self-assemble into one-, two-, and three-dimensional macroscopic structures will enable more effective use of nanorods in solar cells, magnetic storage devices, and sensors. The development should also help boost the...

A research team led by investigators at Mayo Clinic in Florida has found that a small device worn on a patient's brow can be useful in monitoring stroke patients in the hospital. The device measures blood oxygen, similar to a pulse oximeter, which is clipped onto a finger.The tool, known as frontal near-infrared...

An international team of researchers has developed a process that improves the efficiency of generating electric power using molecular structures extracted from plants. The system taps into photosynthetic processes to produce efficient and inexpensive energy.

Check out the newly redesigned Jan/Feb issue of Lighting Technology. Cutting-edge research news, industrial lighting application stories, feature articles, products, and new technologies for license help bring in the new year.

One day in 2010, a Rutgers physicist watched a store employee showcase a kitchen gadget that vacuum-seals food in plastic. The simple concept – an airtight seal around pieces of food – just might apply to his research: developing flexible electronics using lightweight organic semiconductors for...

A low-cost smart paint detects microscopic faults in wind turbines, mines, and bridges before structural damage occurs. The environmentally-friendly paint uses nanotechnology to detect movement in large structures, and could shape the future of safety monitoring.The paint is formed using a recycled waste...

According to a New York Times article, a band of astronomers recently restarted the search for extraterrestrial life, after an appeal for financing. Last spring, the University of California’s Hat Creek observatory, a collection of radio telescopes that listen for radio broadcasts of...

In the microgravity environment of the International Space Station (ISS), telling the difference between an actual fire and a false alarm may not be simple. To understand how to detect smoke in space, researchers from NASA's Glenn Research Center flew the Smoke Aerosol Measurement Experiment (SAME) aboard the...

A team of scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno, installed fiber-optic distributed temperature sensing equipment to conduct long-term monitoring of climate change effects on the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica and its potential for collapse. The equipment continually...

A Battery Management System (BMS) manages Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) batteries in a storage system for pulsed power weapons aboard Naval vessels. The system charges the batteries with a buck converter and uses analog equipment to measure signals. It then digitally converts signals for...

A recent partnership between the University of Southern California Viterbi’s Center for Advanced Transportation Technologies (CATT) and Audi’s Electronics Research Lab has provided USC with an Audi A8 fully equipped with a broad sensor suite that includes radar, lidar (for light detection...

UT Arlington engineers working with Army surgeons are developing a pliable, polymer mask embedded with electrical, mechanical, and biological components that can speed healing from disfiguring facial burns and help rebuild the faces of injured soldiers.The Biomask will be embedded with arrays of...

Scientists from the University of Bristol have developed a soap, composed of iron rich salts dissolved in water, that responds to a magnetic field when placed in solution. The soap’s magnetic properties were proved with neutrons at the Institut Laue-Langevin, which result from tiny iron-rich clumps...

The majority of all-terrain, search-and-rescue robots require large amounts of energy and are prone to overheating. Georgia Tech researchers have designed a new machine by studying the locomotion of a certain type of flexible, efficient animal. “By using their scales to control frictional...

Senate and House leaders announced last week that they are postponing work on two controversial anti-piracy bills, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the (PIPA) Protect IP Act, in the wake of large online protests that spurred some...

MIT researchers have found a way to increase the speed of one of the most important algorithms in the information sciences: the Fourier Transform. It’s a method for representing an irregular signal as a combination of pure frequencies. It’s universal in signal processing, but it can also be used to compress...

Scientists at the University of Greenwich (UK) have released the next generation of buildingEXODUS evacuation and crowd simulation software, already one of the world’s leading design tools for simulating evacuations of people from buildings in both normal and emergency...

No matter how high the energy, electrons won't break apart. But that doesn't mean they are indestructible. Using several massive supercomputers, a team of physicists has split a simulated electron perfectly in half. In the simulations, physicists from Duke University, the University of Zurich, and the...

Today, nearly 80% of all combat injuries to U.S. service personnel are the result of explosive weapon blasts (such as those created by improvised explosive devices, or IEDs), and one-quarter of those injuries involve head trauma. In particular, IED exposure has led to a large increase in...

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have developed a new laboratory test that can rapidly identify the bacterium responsible for staph infections. This new test takes advantage of unique isotopic labeling...

Scientists from IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) have built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit. It uses twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a byte (8 bit) into as few as 96 atoms.For the first time, the...

Physi­cists at the Nanosystems Initiative Munich (NIM) have managed to detect sound waves at minuscule length scales. Their nanoear is a single gold nanoparticle that is kept in a state of levitation by a laser beam. Upon weak acoustic excitation the particle oscillates parallel to the direction of sound...