Category Chemistry/Nanotechnology

In this series, a 3-D printed multimaterial shape-memory minigripper, consisting of shape-memory hinges and adaptive touching tips, grasps a cap screw. Credit: Photo courtesy of Qi (Kevin) Ge; Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license

Heat-responsive materials may aid in controlled drug delivery, solar panel tracking. Engineers from MIT and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) are using light to print 3D structures that “remember” their original shapes. Even after being stretched, twisted, and bent at extreme angles, the structures – from small coils and multimaterial flowers, to an inch-tall replica of the Eiffel tower – sprang back to their original forms within seconds of being heated to a certain temperature “sweet spot...

Converting greenhouse gas emissions into energy-rich fuel using nano silicon (Si) in a carbon-neutral carbon-cycle is illustrated. Credit: Chenxi Qian

Saving the planet from climate change with a grain of sand. Every year, humans advance climate change and global warming – and quite likely our own eventual extinction – by injecting about 30 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. A team of scientists from the University of Toronto (U of T) believes they’ve found a way to convert all these emissions into energy-rich fuel in a carbon-neutral cycle that uses a very abundant natural resource: silicon, the 7th most-abundant element in the universe and the 2nd most-abundant element in the earth’s crust.

The idea of converting carbon dioxide emissions to energy isn’t new: there’s be...

An effective and low-cost solution for storing solar energy. Credit: © Infini Lab / 2016 EPFL

How can we store solar energy for period when the sun doesn’t shine? One solution is to convert it into hydrogen through water electrolysis. The idea is to use the electrical current produced by a solar panel to ‘split’ water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Clean hydrogen can then be stored away for future use to produce electricity on demand, or even as a fuel.

Even though different hydrogen-production technologies have given us promising results in the lab, they are still too unstable or expensive and need to be further developed to use on a commercial and large scale...

The octobot is powered by a chemical reaction and controlled with a soft logic board. A reaction inside the bot transforms a small amount of liquid fuel (hydrogen peroxide) into a large amount of gas, which flows into the octobot’s arms and inflates them like a balloon. The team used a microfluidic logic circuit, a soft analog of a simple electronic oscillator, to control when hydrogen peroxide decomposes to gas in the octobot. Credit: Lori Sanders

Powered by a chemical reaction controlled by microfluidics, 3D-printed ‘octobot’ has no electronics. A team of Harvard University researchers with expertise in 3D printing, mechanical engineering, and microfluidics has demonstrated the first autonomous, untethered, entirely soft robot...