Squealing tires and the crunch of impact – when an accident occurs, the steel sheets that form a motor vehicle’s bodywork must provide adequate impact protection and shield its passengers to the greatest extent possible. But the strength of the steels that are used throw up their own challenges, for example when automobile manufacturers have to punch holes in them for cable routing. Struggling to pierce the hard steel, mechanical cutting tools rapidly wear out. And because they also leave some unwanted material on the underside of the steel (burr, as the experts call it), additional time has to be spent on a finishing process. One possible alternative is to use lasers as cutters, but they require a great deal of energy, which makes the entire process time-consuming and costly. Continue Reading »
As engineers attempt to integrate electronics into things like clothing and medical devices, they’re increasingly running up against the material properties of the substances we use to make the hardware. A lot of the materials that go into a typical electronic device are brittle, inflexible, and prone to damage, and materials scientists are looking at a variety of options for replacing them. A recent paper in Advanced Functional Materials describes a technique for forming an antenna from liquid metal. The resulting (not-so-) hardware is flexible, self-healing, and can change the frequency that it’s sensitive to based on the stress it’s subjected to. Continue Reading »
Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters. Continue Reading »
It’s a touchscreen, a solar panel, a computer circuit, and soon, it could be used at home.
Taking advantage of ink’s natural tendency to create “coffee rings,” a group of Israeli scientists has developed a type of ink jet dye that could one day create a range of power-hungry, and power-producing, devices at home.
“Usually these ‘coffee stains’ are a major problem in ink jet printing,” said Shlomo Magdassi, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and co-author of a new paper in the journal ACS Nano. “I got the idea that we could turn this big problem into a big advantage.” Continue Reading »
An aircraft that combines massive freight capacity, high efficiency and low cost is taking shape in a hangar outside Toledo, Ohio, and could be airborne next year. Continue Reading »
Ordinary paper could one day be used as a lightweight battery to power the devices that are now enabling the printed word to be eclipsed by e-mail, e-books and online news. Continue Reading »
Reducing the weight and cost of hydrogen storage tanks remains one of the technological issues that engineers must overcome to make fuel cell vehicles more practical. Aside from the large metal cylinders currently used in most applications, one of the primary options has been various types of solid state storage that absorbs and then releases the hydrogen. Continue Reading »
Invetech, an innovator in new product development and custom automation for the biomedical, industrial and consumer markets, today announced that it has delivered the world’s first production model 3D bio-printer to Organovo, developers of the proprietary NovoGen bioprinting technology. Organovo will supply the units to research institutions investigating human tissue repair and organ replacement. Continue Reading »
Why use stop sticks for speeding bad guys when you can use an electromagnetic cannon. EMP (electromagnetic pulse) is used to stop a car cold by interfering with the vehicles electronics.
The first three-dimensional carbon nanotube circuits, made by researchers at Stanford University, could be an important step in making nanotube computers that could be faster and use less power than today’s silicon chips. Such a computer is still at least 10 years off, but the Stanford work shows it is possible to make stacked circuits using carbon nanotubes. Stacked circuits cram more processing power in a given area, and also do a better job dissipating waste heat. Continue Reading »
