Energy-Harvesting Displays
Adding solar cells to screens could prolong the battery life of many electronic gadgets.Adding solar cells to liquid-crystal displays could help recover a significant amount of energy that’s ordinarily...
View ArticleSpeeding Up Materials Design
A new computer program accurately predicts the behavior of proposed materials, which means faster development of new electronics and solar cells.A chemical compound designed with the aid of a...
View Article3-D Design Simplified
A new website could accelerate the adoption of 3-D printing.Researchers at Cornell University have launched EndlessForms, a website that lets users create sculptures virtually and render them in...
View ArticlePower-Scavenging Batteries
Inexpensive chips harvest mechanical energy to charge batteries for wireless sensors.MicroGen Systems, a startup based in Ithaca, New York, is developing energy-harvesting chips designed to power...
View ArticleFlash Memory That'll Keep On Shrinking
Using atom-thick carbon instead of silicon could pack ever more data into portable electronics.Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, and one of the largest manufacturers of computer...
View ArticleNew Battery Could Be Just What the Grid Ordered
A Pittsburgh company says its battery has the long life and cheap cost needed to be practical for energy storage.Utilities need cheap, long-lasting ways to store the excess energy produced by power...
View ArticleA New Twist on Artificial Muscles
Carbon nanotube yarns produce as much torque as an electric motor.Researchers have created artificial muscles that can twist 1,000 times more than any suitable material made in the past—a development...
View ArticleA New Coating Promises the End of Smudges
Materials-coating advance could lead to eyeglasses that shed fingerprints.German researchers armed with smoking candles have come up with a cheap and easy way to coat surfaces so that oil droplets...
View ArticleNew Process Makes Heat-Harvesting Materials Cheaply
Such materials could be used to cool computers and buildings, and harvest waste heat in cars.High-efficiency thermoelectric materials could lead to new types of cooling systems, and new ways to...
View ArticleHow Seagate's Terabit-Per-Square-Inch Hard Drive Works
Heat-assisted magnetic recording promises 60-terabyte hard disks.Magnetic hard disks will soon be able to store one terabit (a trillion bits) per square inch. Seagate has demonstrated that landmark...
View ArticleNanocapsules Sober Up Drunken Mice
Wrapping alcohol-digesting enzymes in a nanoscale polymer allows them to quickly reduce blood alcohol content.Researchers have reduced blood alcohol levels in intoxicated mice by injecting them with...
View ArticleMolecule Helps Nanoparticles Sneak Past the Immune System
Researchers have given nanoparticles the ability to tell immune cells not to eat them, a development that could have broad implications for medicine.Taking a cue from nature, researchers have designed...
View ArticleAre We Really on the Verge of a Napster-fication of Physical Objects?
3-D printing technology is evolving quickly, but not that quickly.Buzz around 3-D printing went mainstream earlier this month when President Obama hyped the technology in the State of the Union...
View ArticleResearch Hints at Graphene’s Photovoltaic Potential
Newly observed properties mean the material could be a highly efficient converter of light to electric power.Researchers have demonstrated that graphene is highly efficient at generating electrons upon...
View ArticleA Nanofabrication Technique Doubles Hard Drive Capacity
Laboratory advance shows that nano-imprinting could help the hard drive industry meet its long-term goals for data storage capacity.Researchers at HGST, a major manufacturer of hard disk drives, have...
View ArticleNovel Material Shows Promise for Extracting Uranium from Seawater
A so-called metal-organic framework could offer a better way to get at the vast uranium resource dissolved in the ocean.A new material could potentially be used to extract uranium from seawater more...
View ArticleResearchers ID Thousands of Organic Materials for Use in Solar Cells
Using computers to virtually test new molecules could lead to new types of solar cells.Using donated computing power and drawing on the theory of quantum mechanics, Harvard researchers have...
View ArticleA Manufacturing Tool Builds 3-D Heart Tissue
A layer-by-layer fabrication tool lets researchers quickly form complicated biological tissue in three-dimensional space.By adapting a programmable device used to manufacture integrated circuits,...
View ArticleHow Window Glass Is Getting Smarter
A material that selectively blocks heat and light could finally make it practical to add smart windows to buildings.Heliotrope Technologies, an early-stage startup currently incubating at Lawrence...
View ArticleControlled Crystals Make a New Solar Material Practical
A new kind of low-cost, high efficiency solar cell emerges thanks to crystals known as perovskites.A new way to control the growth of crystalline materials called perovskites could lead to commercial...
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