Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

This is a full robot set. Credit: MIT CSAIL

MIT CSAIL’s ‘Interactive Robogami’ lets you design in minutes, and 3D-print, assemble origami-inspired robots from 2D designs in 4 hours. Even as robots become increasingly common, they remain incredibly difficult to make. From designing and modeling to fabricating and testing, the process is slow and costly: even one small change can mean days or weeks of rethinking and revising important hardware. But what if there was a way to let non-experts craft different robotic designs – in one sitting?

One of the key features of the system is that it allows designers to determine both the robot’s movement (“gait”) and shape (“geometry”), a capability that’s often separated in design systems...

Soft, stretchable, high power density electronic skin-based biofuel cells for scavenging energy from human sweat that can power BLE radio, LEDs etc

A team of engineers has developed stretchable fuel cells that extract energy from sweat and are capable of powering electronics, such as LEDs and Bluetooth radios. The biofuel cells generate 10X more power per surface area than any existing wearable biofuel cells. The epidermal biofuel cells are a major breakthrough in the field, which has been struggling with making the devices that are stretchable enough and powerful enough. UCSD engineers used a combination of clever chemistry, advanced materials and electronic interfaces...

This diagram depicts a new reaction mechanism that could be used to improve catalyst designs for pollution-control systems for diesel exhaust.
Credit: Purdue University photo/Maureen Lifton

Researchers have discovered a new reaction mechanism that could be used to improve catalyst designs for pollution control systems to further reduce emissions of smog-causing nitrogen oxides in diesel exhaust. The research focuses on a type of catalyst called zeolites, workhorses in petroleum and chemical refineries and in emission-control systems for diesel engines. New catalyst designs are needed to reduce the emission of nitrogen oxides, or NOx, because current technologies only work well at relatively high temperatures.

“The key challenge in reducing emissions is that they can occur over a very broad ...

Researchers team has developed inks made of graphene-like materials for inkjet printing. New black phosphorous inks are compatible with conventional inkjet printing techniques for optoelectronics and photonics. Credit: University of Cambridge

An international team has developed inks made of graphene-like materials for inkjet printing. New black phosphorus inks are compatible with conventional inkjet printing techniques for optoelectronics and photonics. Black phosphorus is a particularly interesting post-graphene nanomaterial for next generation devices. Yet despite remarkable performance in the lab, practical real-world exploitation of this material has been hindered by complex material fabrication and its poor environmental stability.

“Our inkjet printing demonstration makes possible for...