Sensors & Test

Rise of Robots in the Food Industry

From food packaging to preparation and delivery to serving in restaurants, robots are helping the food industry meet labor shortages and reduce costs. When did robots debut in the food industry and what’s their future? Take this quiz to find out.

Data Library Enables Analysis of Electric Grid Issues

Dr. Aaron J. Wilson and his team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed The Grid Event Signature Library — an open-access online collection of datasets containing waveforms that are visual representations of behaviors of the electric grid, which can help analyze anomalous events.

Space Station Germ Testing Improves Wastewater Monitoring

A technology developed for NASA to identify pathogens inside spacecraft turned out to be beneficial for wastewater surveillance on Earth.

Products of Tomorrow

See the products of tomorrow, including the Third Thumb, an extra robotic thumb aimed at increasing the wearer’s range of movement; a way to display full-color, 3D moving images over a direct view of the real world; and an adjustable filter that can successfully prevent interference, even in higher-frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Unique Datapath Architecture Yields Real-Time Computing

Innovators at NASA Johnson Space Center have developed and successfully flight tested a high-performance computing platform, known as the Descent and Landing Computer (DLC), to suit the demands of safe, autonomous, extraterrestrial spacecraft landings for robotic and human exploration missions.

Event Sensors Are Changing the Paradigm in Machine Vision

Event-based vision is well on its way to establishing itself as a paradigm that will create a new standard in many markets requiring efficiency in how machines can see. Over the past several years, it has successfully evolved to meet a wider range of uses. And by continuing to adapt and address the requirements of many applications, we will see more event-based cameras all around us.

Tactile Sensing Strategy Enables Accurate Object Detection

Researchers from Tsinghua University worked to break through the difficulties of robotic recognition of various common, yet complex, items. Read on to learn more.

New Products

See the new products, including Asahi Kasei Microdevices Corporation's CZ39 series of coreless current sensors, Bourns, Inc.'s latest miniature resettable thermal cutoff device series, Orion S.A.'s range of high-performance conductive additives that improve Li-ion battery performance, and Littelfuse, Inc.'s newest member of its eFuse Protection IC lineup, the LS0502SCD33S.

The Impact of Fast Charging on the EV Charging Chain

With fast charging becoming more common, precise and reliable temperature sensing across the charging chain will remain critical even as battery technologies evolve. Read on to learn why.

New Technique Pinpoints Nanoscale ‘Hot Spots’ in Electronics

When electronic devices like laptops or smartphones overheat, they are fundamentally suffering from a nanoscale heat transfer problem. Pinpointing the source of that problem...

Built For AI, This Chip Moves Beyond Transistors for Huge Computational Gains

The Defense Department’s largest research organization has partnered with a Princeton University-led effort to develop advanced microchips for artificial...

Hardy Transistor Material Could be a Game-Changer for Nuclear Reactor Safety Monitoring

The safety and efficiency of a large, complex nuclear reactor can be enhanced by hardware as simple as a tiny sensor that monitors a cooling system....

Ant Insights Lead to Robot Navigation Breakthrough

Have you ever wondered how insects are able to go so far beyond their home and still find their way home? The answer to this question is not only relevant to biology but also to making the...

Creating the Self-Healing Grid of the Future

It’s not hard to imagine the potential value of a self-healing grid, one able to adapt and bounce back to life, ensuring uninterrupted power even when assailed by a hurricane or a group of bad...

International Space Station Uses Cordierite Ceramic Mirror for Optical Communication

A cordierite ceramic mirror was used first time in experimental equipment to conduct optical communication between the International Space Station and a mobile optical station on Earth.

How Much Do You Know About Labs-on-a-Chip

Lab-on-a-Chip (LoC) technology integrates various analyses such as biochemical operations, chemical synthesis, and DNA sequencing onto a single chip, which otherwise would have been performed in a laboratory taking a substantial amount of time. How much do you know about LoCs? Find out with this quiz.

NASA’s Noise-Testing Tool Finds Applications Beyond Aircraft

Wireless microphone array quickly, cheaply, accurately maps noise from aircraft and much more.

Medical-Grade Smartwatch Can Monitor Astronauts, Patients

The wrist-worn device astronauts have been using to collect data is going out of production, and the EmbracePlus could address some of the limitations of the previous device, including comfort and connectivity, especially given that the other device doesn’t stream data in real time.

Imperceptible Sensors Printed Directly on Human Skin

Researchers have developed a method to make adaptive and eco-friendly sensors that can be directly and imperceptibly printed onto a wide range of biological surfaces.

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.

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...

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...

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...