A group of University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and a collaborator from China have developed a nanogenerator that harvests energy from a car's rolling tire friction. The technology ultimately could provide automobile manufacturers with a new way to reuse energy and provide greater vehicle...

Flexible optoelectronic devices that can be produced roll-to-roll – much like newspapers are printed – are a highly promising path to cheaper devices such as solar cells and LED lighting panels. Scientists from "TREASORES" project recently demonstrated prototype flexible...

Norlux (Elgin, IL) has introduced new NorFlex brand flexible continuous light engine material. The cuttable high-power LED circuits on a semi-rigid material provide 5x the lumen output of low power flex materials. Available on 200-400 ft. reels, the material is cuttable to maximize production flexibility. No...

This week's Question: The Fujitsu Arrows NX F-04G, a new smartphone set for release in Japan, comes with a built-in retinal scanner that can be used for a variety of different functions, including unlocking the device, accessing apps, and making mobile payments. A front-facing infrared...

This week's Question: At this year's Mobile World Congress in Spain, Sierra Wireless and Philips CityTouch demonstrated "smart city" lighting capabilities. The companies' systems connect a city's individual street lights to the Internet via 2G, 3G, and 4G networks. The "smart" technology allows...

UCLA researchers have successfully combined two nanomaterials to create a new energy storage medium that combines the best qualities of batteries and supercapacitors.

The new hybrid supercapacitor stores large amounts of energy, recharges quickly, and can last for more than 10,000 recharge cycles. The...

As crewed space missions extend beyond low Earth orbit, the need to reliably recover potable water is critical. Aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the water is recycled from cabin humidity condensate, urine distillate, and hygiene wash wastes. In spacecraft cabin air...

Wilbrecht LEDCO (St. Paul, MN) has added symbol/legend marking options to its 100/600 series of panel LEDs for custom applications. Custom and universal symbols, such as battery light or oil level, can be used for easy identification. A simple stamp printing process allows a pictogram or short word to be printed in...

Innovations in Optics, Inc. (Woburn, MA) offers high power LED Light Engines as excitation illuminators for large field-of-view fluorescent imagers used in life science instruments. LumiBright LE Light Engines feature patented non-imaging optics that direct LED...

Unlike previous lighting requirements, LED testing has become more stringent and complicated, and involves a significant number of tests for various lighting characteristics. From measuring lumen output, efficacy, correlated color temperature (CCT), color rendering index (CRI), and...

LED lighting is popular because many governments are banning incandescent bulbs to save energy and carbon dioxide, especially for general lighting. In the automotive industry LEDs are being used because they save energy and costs, especially with the migration to hybrid cars and electric vehicles, and because...

When residents of the Park Centre Casitas residential community in Mesa, Arizona, got together and hired a security company to survey the property and suggest ways to keep it safe, the security company suggested adding perimeter lighting.

Light Efficient Design, a division of TADD, LLC, recently completed an LED retrofit project in the busy “Street of Dreams” retail area of the Monte Carlo Casino and Resort. Monte Carlo, one of 10 MGM resorts on the Las Vegas Strip, replaced 96 500-watt halogen lamps...

Scientists at the University of Washington have developed what they believe is the thinnest-possible semiconductor, a new class of nanoscale materials made in sheets only three atoms thick. Two of these single-layer semiconductor materials can be connected in an atomically seamless...

The ordinary light bulb is an innovation so extraordinary that a sudden brilliant idea is called “a light bulb moment.” Credit for inventing the first incandescent-style light bulb often goes to Thomas Edison, but even that wasn’t a light bulb moment. In fact, his patent for an...

The most common kind of light bulb in the United States— the incandescent—is only about 5 percent efficient. The phosphorescent organic light-emitting diode, on the other hand, makes light out of 100 percent of the electricity that goes into it. They're good for...

Oriel Instruments (Bozeman, MT), a Newport Company, has introduced the LSH-7320 LED Class ABA Solar Simulator. Compared to conventional solar simulators with Xenon sources, the LED-based solar simulator provides fast turn-on, a much longer lifetime, and reduced waste heat for easy integration into glove boxes. The system is...

CEL (Santa Clara, CA) has announced the field trial release of its new MeshWorks™ wireless software suite. This new platform unites several tools to help create and simplify a complete mesh network design as part of the Internet of Things (IoT).

EVT (Karlsruhe, Germany) presents a new light controller for difficult lighting situations. The Eye-MIO Light controller can be connected to sys tems with RS232, USB and Ethernet. EyeMIO Light is suitable for almost any lighting situation, from flash to auton omous control of sequence lighting (e.g. shape from shading). With the...

DELO (Windach, Germany) now offers a new, high-intensity LED spot lamp with a wavelength of 400 nm. The DELOLUX 50 allows for fast, reliable, pinpoint curing of adhesive layers with thicknesses up to 10 mm, making it suitable for transmission through plastics like polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), polycarbonate (PC) or polyamide (PA)....

Researchers at MIT and Northeastern University have equipped a robot with a novel tactile sensor that lets it grasp a USB cable draped freely over a hook and insert it into a USB port.

The sensor is an adaptation of a technology called GelSight, which was developed by the lab of Edward Adelson,...

The most common, and cost-effective, method of delivering white light from an LED is to combine a blue “pump” LED source under a layer of phosphor or phosphor blends to achieve the desired spectrum. While there are relatively few manufacturers of high-quality blue LED die, there are a substantial number of companies...