Category Physics

A human-like 3D-printed smart gel walks underwater. Credit: Daehoon Han/Rutgers University-New Brunswick

New technology has biomedical, soft robot and other applications. Engineers have created a 3D-printed smart gel that walks underwater and grabs objects and moves them. The watery creation could lead to soft robots that mimic sea animals like the octopus, which can walk underwater and bump into things without damaging them. It may also lead to artificial heart, stomach and other muscles, along with devices for diagnosing diseases, detecting and delivering drugs and performing underwater inspections.

Soft materials like the smart gel are flexible, often cheaper to manufacture than hard materials and can be miniaturized...

Illustration of the quantum entanglement achieved between the two clouds of atoms starting from a single Bose-Einstein condensate. Credit: Iagoba Apellaniz. UPV/EHU

Scientists have achieved, in an experiment, quantum entanglement between 2 Bose-Einstein condensates, spatially separated from each other. Quantum entanglement was discovered by Schrödinger and later studied by Einstein and other scientists in the last century. The groups of entangled particles lose their individuality and behave as a single entity. Any change in one of the particles leads to an immediate response in the other, even if they are spatially separated...

RoboFly, the first wireless insect-sized flying robot, is slightly heavier than a toothpick. Credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington

RoboFly is slightly heavier than a toothpick and is powered by a laser beam. Insect-sized flying robots could help with time-consuming tasks like surveying crop growth on large farms or sniffing out gas leaks. These robots soar by fluttering tiny wings because they are too small to use propellers, like those seen on their larger drone cousins. Small size is advantageous: These robots are cheap to make and can easily slip into tight places that are inaccessible to big drones.

But current flying robo-insects are still tethered to the ground. The electronics they need to power and control their wings are too heavy for these miniature robots to carry...

Schematic representation of the ultrafast optical pump – terahertz probe experiment, where the optical pump induces electron heating and the terahertz pulse is sensitive to the conductivity of graphene directly after this heating process, which occurs on a timescale faster than a millionth of a millionth of a second. Credit: Illustration: Fabien Vialla/ICFO

Light detection and control lies at the heart of many modern device applications, such as the camera you have in your phone. Using graphene as a light-sensitive material for light detectors can offer significant improvements with respect to materials being used nowadays. For example, graphene can detect light of almost any colour, and it gives an extremely fast electronic response within one millionth of a millionth of a second...