Category Physics

A trio of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with a colleague at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has designed and built a working quadruped robot with magnetized feet that can climb on the walls and ceilings of metal buildings and structures.

In their paper published in in the journal Science Robotics, Seungwoo Hong, Yong Um, Hae-Won Park and Jaejun Park describe their robot and how well it worked when tested under real world conditions.

As the technology used to build robots improves, engineers find more ways...

Though plants can serve as a source of food, oxygen and décor, they’re not often considered to be a good source of electricity. But by collecting electrons naturally transported within plant cells, scientists can generate electricity as part of a “green,” biological solar cell. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have, for the first time, used a succulent plant to create a living “bio-solar cell” that runs on photosynthesis.

In all living cells, from bacteria and fungi to plants and animals, electrons are shuttled around as part of natural, biochemical proces...

Research led by Monash University, RMIT and the University of Adelaide has developed an accurate method of controlling optical circuits on fingernail-sized photonic integrated circuits.

The development, published in the journal Optica builds on the work by the same team who recently created the world’s first self-calibrated photonic chip.

Photonics, or the use of light particles to store and transmit information, is a burgeoning field, supporting our need to create faster, better, more efficient and more sustainable technology.

Programmable photonic integrated circuits (PICs), offer diverse signal processing functions within a single chip, and present promising solutions for applications ranging from optical communications to artificial intelligence.

Whether it’s downloadi...

Combustion engines, propellers, and hydraulic pumps are examples of fluidic devices—instruments that utilize fluids to perform certain functions, such as generating power or transporting water.

Because fluidic devices are so complex, they are typically developed by experienced engineers who manually design, prototype, and test each apparatus through an iterative process that is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. But with a new system, users only need to specify the locations and speeds at which fluid enters and exits the device. The computational pipeline then automatically generates an optimal design that achieves those objectives.

The system could make it faster and cheaper to design fluidic devices for all sorts of applications, such as microfluidic labs-on-a-c...