Technology

Over the past decades, technological advances have fueled great innovation in a wide range of fields. Emerging and rapidly developing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems, three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) printing, digital twins (i.e., virtual representations of physical objects, systems or processes) and advanced robots, are set to... Read more

Termite mounds are remarkable structures that regulate temperature, balance airflow, and maintain structural stability in some of Earth's harshest climates. And like other irregular, disordered systems, they can be difficult to replicate with modern engineering techniques.... Read more

Paintings are often made up of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, each going in a certain direction, that are not easily observed by the viewer. A cross-disciplinary research team from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and Loughborough University in England has developed an image analysis method... Read more

It's been said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Writing, or talking, about dancing can be similarly futile. A Cornell doctoral student has helped develop a tool that lets dancers use video and extended reality (XR) headsets to create an immersive environment for analyzing and refining their... Read more

Researchers have identified previously unknown materials, including a new form of a widely studied clean-energy material, by carefully controlling and tracking how molecular precursors break down during heating.... Read more

Researchers at Seoul National University have developed a new class of ultralight structural materials that combine the load-bearing strength of engineering materials with the weight of foam. Using a method called 3D node winding, the team created mesoscale carbon fiber lattices that achieve aluminum-level performance on a strength-to-weight basis while... Read more

There is no question that violin-making is an art form. It requires a musician's ear, a craftsperson's skill, and a historian's appreciation of lessons learned over time. Making a violin also takes trust: Violin makers (luthiers) often must wait until the instrument is finished before they can hear how all... Read more

Nature is replete with slender filaments that bend and coil—from climbing grape vines, to folded proteins, to elephant trunks that can pick up a peanut but also take down a tree.... Read more

A research team led by Dr. Nam Ki-Hun at the Battery Materials and Process Research Center of the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) has successfully developed a nano-tin (Sn) interlayer control technology to address interfacial instability between the lithium metal anode and solid electrolyte, a critical hurdle to the commercialization... Read more

A thermoelectric generator with a shape that no human designer would likely have imagined has now been created by a computer—and it performs more than eight times better than conventional designs. Rather than relying on intuition or repeated trial and error, the breakthrough was achieved through advanced computational optimization.... Read more

Perovskite solar cells are a rapidly advancing photovoltaic technology that has seen a dramatic rise in power conversion efficiency in recent years. A key driver of this progress is the use of molecular charge-selective contacts—ultrathin interlayers only a few nanometers thick—that replace conventional bulk transport materials. These molecular layers play... Read more

Scientists are advancing a promising solution to two of the world's biggest challenges—plastic pollution and clean energy—by transforming waste plastics into valuable fuels using sunlight.... Read more

Researchers have developed an ultra-thin optical film that improves the quality of the light used in LCD resin-based 3D printers. The advance helps ensure that tiny details are reproduced with precision, which could make it possible to 3D-print medical-grade or industrial-grade products at a lower cost.... Read more

A University at Buffalo-led team has found a way to help chiral semiconductors, electronic materials whose structures are left- or right-handed like many of life's building blocks, absorb visible light. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers chemically combined a chiral semiconducting material with a non-chiral molecule that more... Read more

DNA stores our genetic code. What if it could also be integrated with electronics to store and read other information? Scientists have been investigating how to store data in DNA, but retrieving the information remains a challenge.... Read more

Chinese tech firms WeRide and Lenovo will expand their partnership to deploy 200,000 autonomous vehicles globally over the next five years, a WeRide statement said on Monday.... Read more

As devices for wireless sensing systems become smaller and more complex, finding suitable power sources for them is becoming increasingly difficult. However, advances in low-power sensing technology may allow such systems to operate using small amounts of energy available in the environment, such as body heat.... Read more

Over the past decades, technological advances have opened remarkable possibilities for the detection and monitoring of various physiological signals associated with heart health (e.g., heart rate and ECG), sleep stages and physical activity. Most existing health and fitness trackers, however, are powered by a battery that needs to be recharged... Read more

The retina, the thin layer of tissue at the back of the eye, is made up of photoreceptor cells that convert visible light into electrical signals, which is essential for human vision. Some diseases, such as retinal degeneration, cause these photoreceptor cells to stop working, which results in blindness. Researchers... Read more

A team of Korean researchers has developed a lightweight elastic suit that can support the activities of various groups experiencing physical burdens in daily life, raising expectations.... Read more

Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE have succeeded in creating colored films with transparent cutouts, thereby producing realistic-looking designs on photovoltaic modules. In this way, roof tiles, for example, can be imitated. The film cutout patterns utilize MorphoColor technology, an invention of Fraunhofer ISE that creates... Read more

Metal-organic frameworks, better known as MOFs, are among the most intensely studied materials for addressing major environmental challenges. Their highly ordered, ultra-porous architecture enables applications ranging from CO2 capture and air or water purification to catalysis and hydrogen production. It is therefore no surprise that MOFs have drawn global attention... Read more

Princeton researchers have combined brain cells and advanced electronics into a single 3D device that can be programmed to recognize patterns using computational techniques. Past attempts at using brain cells to do computation have relied on 2D cultures grown in a petri dish or 3D clusters that are probed and... Read more

As quantum computers advance, they are expected to be able to break tried-and-true security schemes that currently keep most sensitive data secure from attackers. Scientists and policymakers are working to design and implement post-quantum cryptography to defend against these future attacks.... Read more

When a knot lets go, it doesn't just fall apart. It snaps. That simple observation led Penn Engineers to rethink what a knot can do. Instead of treating it as something that holds tension, they asked a different question: what happens when you design a knot to release it? The... Read more

What if the next generation of disposable electronics—the sensors in your food packaging, the diagnostic strips in a medical clinic, the environmental monitors scattered across a farm—were built not on silicon or plastic, but on a sheet of paper you could buy at the grocery store?... Read more

The popularity of cloud computing and AI—driving massive data flows—pushes demand for ultra-high-speed, energy-efficient optical links within and between data centers; links that must be able to deliver data rates well beyond today's 200Gb/s standard. The heterogeneous integration of new materials onto silicon photonics platforms will enable next-gen electro-optical modulators... Read more

A smart pillow sleeve that vibrates to alert people who are deaf to fire and burglar alarms in the night has been created by scientists at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Developed with members of the Deaf community, the smart textile technology replaces bulky gadgets that are kept under pillows which... Read more

A technique that improves the performance and stability of next-generation solar cells—without adding any chemicals or coatings—has been demonstrated by researchers from Korea University and the University of Surrey.... Read more

A research team led by Prof. Kim Bong-hoon from the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology has developed a semiconductor fiber-based wearable sweat sensor that can collect sweat automatically and analyze various biosignals simultaneously without an external power source. They have... Read more

Scientists have found a way to boost terahertz technology using particles thousands of times smaller than a grain of sand. Research published in Scientific Reports by Loughborough University's Emergent Photonics Research Center shows how a sparse layer of nanoparticles can make materials that produce terahertz radiation more efficient.... Read more

An ultrathin silicone film being developed at Saarland University enables pumps to operate without motors, without compressed air and without lubricants or external sensors. These film-based pumps can be switched on and off as needed and integrated into designs previously thought impossible.... Read more

From the geometric symmetry in Islamic tiles to the mechanical versatility of origami, cultural patterns have an extensive range of structures. Inspired by cultural geometries, researchers from the University of Edinburgh created and tested metamaterials—materials whose properties depend highly on their patterned structure rather than solely composition—comprised of Chinese characters.... Read more

Infrared sensors that detect the short-wave infrared (SWIR) region can clearly recognize objects not only during the day and at night, but also in fog or smoke, making them a key component of future intelligent technologies such as autonomous vehicles, robotics, night surveillance, and medical imaging.... Read more

Most smart home devices require power one way or another. You have to plug them in, recharge them, or replace their batteries at some point. Georgia Tech researchers think they have a better way with small metal tags that can signal when a door or drawer is opened, count reps... Read more

In its CeraMMAM project, a team of researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) has developed a system with which high-performance components can be produced from multiple materials in a single process using a universal binder system. This technology offers new prospects for industrial applications, particularly in medicine, mechanical... Read more

Seoul National University College of Engineering announced that a research team led by Prof. Sung-Hoon Ahn of the Department of Mechanical Engineering has developed, for the first time in the world, an "interference acoustic band-pass filter" capable of selectively filtering and amplifying specific frequencies without the use of electronic circuits.... Read more

Metamaterials are carefully engineered materials that possess desirable properties and can be used to manipulate electromagnetic, acoustic, or other types of waves in interesting ways. Some materials scientists and engineers have been trying to use these materials to develop so-called invisible devices, or, in other words, devices that do not... Read more

While sustainable solar energy can potentially meet our global power needs, it has one major flaw. When sunlight disappears, solar panels stop generating electricity. The problem is that while they do an excellent job of converting light into power, they are not so good at storing the energy they collect.... Read more

Imagine a battery that stores more power, lasts longer, and remains safe even under stress. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago have discovered how to boost the energy density and cycle life of the power cells that form the core... Read more

Numbers are the language of science—yet in research articles, they are often buried within the text and difficult to analyze. Researchers at Jülich have developed an AI system that automatically identifies these numbers, categorizes them, and converts them into structured data. The Quinex framework thus eliminates the need for time-consuming... Read more

A tightly packed ball of office staples can be surprisingly strong. Try to pull it apart and the tangled metal resists like a solid object. But with the right movement or vibration, that same bundle can quickly fall back into loose pieces. A team of engineers and materials scientists in... Read more

Recent progress in advanced energy manufacturing has opened a new path for lithium battery design. A joint research team led by Associate Professor Eric Jianfeng Cheng of Tohoku University has published a review in Materials Science and Engineering: R: Reports, that highlights the potential, the pitfalls, and different perspectives of... Read more

When we think of materials, we usually think of substances like metal, concrete, glass or rubber. What these examples have in common is that they are inactive: when pushed, pulled, shifted or sheared they may move or deform, but only by using the energy that is provided from the outside... Read more

The same wireless technology that can track your cat or locate an item in a warehouse can also monitor your breathing. Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sahlgrenska University Hospital and the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, now present a completely new method for measuring breathing movements in patients with impaired... Read more

Northwestern University engineers printed artificial neurons that don't just imitate the brain—they talk to it. In a new study, the Northwestern team developed flexible, low-cost devices that generate electrical signals realistic enough to activate living brain cells. When tested on slices of tissue from mouse brains, the artificial neurons successfully... Read more

In a recently published paper in Science Advances, a team led by Rice University's Yong Lin Kong describes a new 3D-printing process with focused microwaves that overcomes a fundamental constraint of electronics 3D printing that has limited the field's potential for more than a decade: the inability to heat printed... Read more

University of Washington researchers developed the first system that incorporates tiny cameras in off-the-shelf wireless earbuds to allow users to talk with an AI model about the scene in front of them. For instance, a user might turn to a Korean food package and say, "Hey Vue, translate this for... Read more

A research team from Skoltech (part of the VEB.RF group) and other scientific organizations in Russia and India has conducted a systematic study of the laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB) process for aluminum bronze. This material is significantly important for components operating under intense thermal loads that require efficient heat... Read more

Silicon has long been seen as a promising anode material for next-generation lithium-ion batteries because it can store much more lithium than graphite. But silicon also expands and contracts sharply during charging and discharging, which can crack the electrode, disrupt electrical pathways and shorten battery life.... Read more