Two innovations for on-the-go mobile-device users seeking a quick charge are in the works: Starbucks plans to install wireless charging devices in all of its stores; and a new battery design could enable rapid charging of lithium-ion batteries in ten minutes.
Starbucks stores will have “Powermat Spots” — designated areas on tables and counters where customers can place their compatible device and charge them wirelessly. The system uses… read more
A next-generation ultrasonic imaging system that could provide 1,000 times higher resolution than today’s medical ultrasound systems has been demonstrated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers.
The researchers used a combination of subpicosecond laser pulses and unique nanostructures to produce acoustic phonons — quasi-particles of vibrational energy that move through an atomic lattice as sound waves — at a frequency of 10 gigahertz (10 billion… read more
Computer scientists from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle have created an automated computer program that they claim “teaches everything there is to know about any visual concept.”
Called Learning Everything about Anything (LEVAN), the program searches millions of books and images on the Web to learn all possible variations of a concept, then displays the results… read more
The first known human climbing of a glass wall using gecko-inspired climbing devices has been demonstrated by DARPA’s Z-Man program.
A 218-pound climber ascended and descended 25 feet of glass with no climbing equipment other than a pair of hand-held, gecko-inspired paddles (he also carried an additional 50-pound load in one trial).
A gecko is able to climb on glass by using… read more
A paralyzed person wearing a brain-controlled robotic exoskeleton is expected to make the first kick during the opening of the FIFA 2014 World Cup in Brazil on June 12.
The Walk Again Project is an international collaboration of more than 100 scientists, led by Prof. Miguel Nicolelis of Duke University and the International Institute for Neurosciences of Natal, Brazil.… read more
Researchers at three institutions have teamed up to develop new terahertz detectors based on carbon nanotubes that could lead to significant improvements in medical imaging, airport passenger screening, food inspection, and other applications.
The research at Sandia National Laboratories, Rice University and the Tokyo Institute of Technology is described in a paper in Nano Letters journal. The technique uses carbon nanotubes to detect… read more
Johns Hopkins researchers have created a miniature human retina in a dish that can sense light.
The work, reported online June 10 in the journal Nature Communications, “advances opportunities for vision-saving research and may ultimately lead to technologies that restore vision in people with retinal diseases,” says study leader M. Valeria Canto-Soler, Ph.D., an assistant professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.… read more
A Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) team has created artificial blood vessels using a three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting technique.
The study is published online this month in Lab on a Chip.
“Engineers have made incredible strides in making complex artificial tissues such as those of the heart, liver and lungs,” said senior study author, Ali Khademhosseini, PhD, biomedical engineer, and director of the BWH Biomaterials… read more
Finnif
Finnish and Italian researchers have developed a way to align molecular self-assemblies from nanometers to millimeters, an alternative to conventional top-down lithography approaches for creating electronic devices.
Molecular self-assembly, a concept derived from biology, leads to spontaneous organization of molecules into more complex and functional supramolecular structures.
Molecular self-assembly has been used for “templating” (using a pattern to cut or shape) functional devices, molecular… read more
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers have devised a technique that allows supramolecules (self-assembling nanoparticle arrays) to form a highly ordered thin film over macroscopic (large-scale) distances in one minute, instead of hours.
The supramolecules are based on block copolymers that were combined with gold nanoparticles to create nanocomposites. Under solvent annealing, these quickly self-assembled into hierarchically structured thin films spanning an area of several square… read more
University of Washington (UW) scientists have developed a new computational method for building new customized proteins that self-assemble (like biological systems) to revolutionize things like targeted delivery of drugs, vaccine development, and even electronic devices.
The work is based in the Rosetta macromolecular modeling package, which was developed by David Baker’s laboratory at the UW Institute for Protein Design, in collaboration… read more
Invisibility cloaks can’t make objects fully invisible in all directions, colors, and polarizations, but Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) physicists have developed a workaround: an ideal invisibility cloak for diffusive light-scattering media, such as fog.
Their results are published in the journal Science.
In diffusive media, light is scattered by the particles in the medium. Examples are fog, clouds, or frosted glass panes that let the… read more
The Turing Test was passed for the first time by a chatbot called “Eugene Goostman” on Saturday by convincing 33% of the human judges that it was human, according to Professor Kevin Warwick, a Visiting Professor at the University of Reading and Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research at Coventry University, in a statement.
The Turing Test, proposed by mathematician and code-breaker Alan Turing in a 1950 paper,… read more
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have developed a new graphene-based nanoscale architecture that improves the performance of supercapacitors, a development that could mean faster acceleration in electric vehicles and longer battery life in portable electronics.
A supercapacitor is an energy storage device like a battery. The new design is based on ruthenium oxide anchored on a graphene foam electrode. It could deliver two times… read more
University of Central Florida researchers have invented a way to store energy in a copper wire by wrapping a supercapacitor* sheath around a core conductor wire, acting as a battery to power a connected device.
Applications could include electrical vehicles, space-launch vehicles, and portable electronic devices. By being able to store and conduct energy on the same wire, heavy, space-consuming batteries could become a thing of the… read more