Category Technology/Electronics

A professor is reporting on a new type of solar energy harvesting that breaks the efficiency record of all existing technologies. And no less important, it clears the way to use solar power 24/7. Thomas Edison once said, “So long as the sun shines, man will be able to develop power in abundance.”

They’ve done an amazing job with photovoltaic cells which convert sunlight directly into energy. And still, with all the research, history and science behind it, there are limits to how much solar power can be harvested and used — as its generation is restricted only to the daytime.

A University of Houston professor is continuing the historic quest, repo...

Soft robots can navigate hard-to-reach places like pipes or inside the human body. An interdisciplinary team of University of Minnesota Twin Cities scientists and engineers has developed a first-of-its-kind, plant-inspired extrusion process that enables synthetic material growth. The new approach will allow researchers to build better soft robots that can navigate hard-to-reach places, complicated terrain, and potentially areas within the human body.

The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

“This is the first time t...

Researchers experimentally demonstrate the first fully connected annealing processor that can be scaled up across multiple chips. Annealing processors are more energy efficient and quicker at solving mathematical optimization problems than PCs. Researchers at Tokyo University of Science have now developed a new approach to realizing scalable fully coupled annealing processors. These quantum-inspired systems can model the interactions between magnetic spins and use it to solve complex optimization problems. The new method greatly outperforms modern CPUs and shows potential for applications in drug discovery, artificial intelligence, and materials science.

Have you ever been faced with a pro...

The high-performing fibers could speed-up broadband delivery, improve medical imaging and even make solar powered clothing. Due to their very high efficiency in transporting electric charges from light, perovskites are known as the next generation material for solar panels and LED displays. A team led by Dr Lei Su at Queen Mary University of London now have invented a brand-new application of perovskites as optical fibres.

Optical fibres are tiny wires as thin as a human hair, in which light travels at a superfast speed — 100 times faster than electrons in cables. These tiny optical fibres transmit the majority of our internet data. At present, most optical fibres are made of glass...