Category Physics

PNNL’s all-organic aqueous flow battery uses two inexpensive and readily available electrolytes, one containing methyl viologen and another with 4-HO-TEMPO.

Organic battery will be 60% cheaper than standard vanadium flow battery. The organic aqueous flow battery is expected to cost $180 per kilowatt-hour once the technology is fully developed. The lower cost is due to the battery’s active materials being inexpensive organic molecules, compared to the commodity metals used in today’s flow batteries.

“Moving from transition metal elements to synthesized molecules is a significant advancement because it links battery costs to manufacturing rather than commodity metals pricing” said Imre Gyuk...

This is an example of SegNet in action: the separate components of the road scene are all labelled in real time. Credit: Alex Kendall

New smartphone-based system could accelerate development of driverless cars. 2 newly-developed systems for driverless cars can identify a user’s location and orientation in places where GPS does not function, and identify the various components of a road scene in real time on a regular camera or smartphone, performing the same job as sensors costing tens of thousands of pounds.

Although the systems cannot currently control a driverless car, the ability to make a machine ‘see’ and accurately identify where it is and what it’s looking at is a vital part of developing autonomous vehicles and robotics...

Ion trap and two ions (top right). Credit: Image courtesy of Osaka University

Osaka University researchers have succeeded in observing at the intended timing two-phonon quantum interference by using 2 cold calcium ions in ion traps, which spatially confine charged particles. A phonon is a unit of vibrational energy that arises from oscillating particles within crystals. Two-particle quantum interference experiments using two photons or atoms have been previously reported, but this group’s achievement is the world’s first observation using two phonons.

This group demonstrated that the phonon, a quantum mechanical description of an elementary vibrational motion in matter, and the photon, an elementary particle of light, share common properties...

This image shows a selective actuation of the side arms of a soft robot in a horizontal uniform magnetic field. Credit: Sumeet Mishra, North Carolina State University

The ability to control the motion of soft robots, coupled with flexibility, gives them potential applications ranging from biomedical technologies to manufacturing processes. Researchers are interested in using magnetic fields to control the movement of these soft robots because it can be done remotely – the control can be exerted without physically connecting to the polymer – and because magnetic fields are easily obtained from permanent magnets and electromagnets.

A team of researchers has now found a way of embedding long chains of nanoscale magnetite particles in sheets of elastic polymer to form a magnetic polymer nanoco...