Stories

Scientists Create Soft Robots Mimicking Human Skin to Provide Medical Treatment

Scientists have created innovative soft robots equipped with electronic skins and artificial muscles, allowing them to sense their surroundings and adapt their...

Molecular Crystal Motors Move Like Microbes When Exposed to Light

At first glance, Rabih O. Al-Kaysi’s molecular motors look like the microscopic worms you’d see in a drop of pond water. But these wriggling ribbons are not alive;...

Robotic Device Restores Wavelike Muscular Function in the Body

The soft-robotic prototype, driven by strong magnets controlled by a wearable external actuator, can aid patients suffering from blockages caused by tumors or those requiring stents.

How Much Do You Know About Programmable DC Power Supplies?

Programmable DC power supplies have many more uses than those that are just controlled manually. The output levels can be remotely programmed to meet system and application requirements, for example in performing equipment testing. How much do you know about programmable power supplies? Take this quiz to find out.

My Opinion: Energy Storage, Part 2

My opinion: I take a look at some cases where it makes sense to use non-battery methods to store energy.

Creating Synthetic Cell Images for Enhanced Microscopy Analysis

The images that come out of this model are ready to be used to train segmentation models. In a sense, it’s doing microscopy without a microscope.

How Much Do You Know About Fiber Optics?

The science of transmitting data, voice, and images by the passage of light through thin, transparent fibers, fiber optics play a pivotal role in our daily lives. How much do you know about fiber optics? Find out with this quiz.

Developing Next-Gen Solar Cells

Meet perovskite. The synthetic semiconducting material has the potential to convert substantially more solar power than silicon at a lower production cost.

Recreating ‘Star Trek’ Virtual Environments

A system for generating interactive 3D environments, Holodeck generates a virtually limitless range of indoor environments, using AI to interpret users’ requests.

How Much Do You Know About Integrated Building Systems?

Office buildings use a significant portion of the world’s energy resources. Integrated building systems such as HVAC and lighting can significantly reduce that load. How much do you know about integrated building systems? Test your knowledge with this quiz.

A Soft Robot that Crawls like a Caterpillar

Researchers merged origami and modern materials science to create a soft robot that bends and twists through mazes with ease.

Adding Abundant Elements to Improve Li-ion Battery Cathodes

Researchers used X-ray absorption analysis and theoretical calculations to explore the fine details of changes in the structure of the cathode material caused by introducing different dopant elements.

Researchers Demonstrate Cutting-Edge Chip Technology for Ultra-Low Power AI Connected Devices

Researchers from NUS, together with industry partners Soitec and NXP Semiconductors, have demonstrated a new class of silicon systems that...

This Chip Safeguards User Data While Enabling Efficient Computing on a Smartphone

Health-monitoring apps can help people manage chronic diseases or stay on track with fitness goals, using nothing more than a smartphone. However, these apps...

Opening Up the Potential of Thin-Film Electronics for Flexible Chip Design

Silicon semiconductors have become the ‘oil’ of the computer age, as was demonstrated recently by the chip shortage crisis. However, one of the disadvantages of...

How Much Do You Know About Avionics Systems?

How much do you know about avionics systems? Test your knowledge with this quiz.

Snail-Inspired Soft-Suction Climbing Robots

The team demonstrated that the sliding suction is a low-cost, energy-efficient, high-payload, and clean adhesive locomotion strategy, which has high potential for use in climbing robots, outdoor inspection robots, and robotic transportation.

Generative AI that Imitates Human Motion

An international group of researchers has created a new approach to imitating human motion through combining central pattern generators (CPGs) and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). The method not...

Teaching Robots to Move by Sketching Trajectories

Getting robots to perform even a simple task requires tons of behind-the-scenes work. Part of the challenge is planning and executing movements, everything from turning wheels to lifting a...

Jet-Propelled Sea Creatures Could Improve Ocean Robotics

Scientists at the University of Oregon have discovered that colonies of gelatinous sea animals swim through the ocean in giant corkscrew shapes using coordinated jet propulsion, an...

My Opinion: We Should Take a Broad View of Energy Storage

My opinion: We need a holistic approach to energy storage — we should start with the general category and then analyze the pros and cons of different technologies to solve different problems.

Personalized Pills That Can Deliver Timed Doses

Researchers from the University of Nottingham have led work that has fabricated personalized medicine using Multi-Material InkJet 3D Printing (MM-IJ3DP).

How a Single-Shot Imaging System Unveils a Polarized World

Think of all the information we get based on how an object interacts with wavelengths of light — also known as color. Color can tell us if food is safe to eat or if a piece of...

A New Affordable Sensor for Lead Contamination

Engineers at MIT, Nanyang Technological University, and several companies have developed a compact and inexpensive technology for detecting and measuring lead concentrations in water,...

Can Lithium Tantalate Lower the Cost of Manufacturing Photonic Integrated Circuits?

Researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) — or Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne — have leveraged the use of...

Aligning Laser Antenna Optical Components for the LISA Space Mission

In January, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Science Program Committee approved the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) mission, the first scientific endeavour to...

Giving Household Robots Common Sense

Whereas prior works have focused on leveraging LLMs directly for planning in symbolic spaces, this work uses LLMs to guide the search of task structures and constraints implicit in multi-step physical demonstrations.

Universal Automated Dosing Systems Could Become Reality

Researchers have created and demonstrated a method of universalizing blood-glucose detection technology as a way of rapidly and inexpensively creating sensors that can monitor the dosing of chemotherapies and other drugs in real time.

Understanding Space Sustainability

The issue of space sustainability has been gaining more attention with the growing population of objects in low Earth orbit. This debris needs to be tracked to avoid collisions. Test your knowledge about space sustainability in this quiz.