Category Technology/Electronics

Technology paves way for intelligent solar cells, other highly efficient devices programmed at the macro and nano scale. Engineers created light-activated materials that execute precise movements and form complex shapes without the need for wires, motors or other energy sources. The research could lead to smart light-driven systems such as high-efficiency solar cells that automatically follow the sun’s direction.

Researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering have created light-activated composite devices...

Superconducting coils for contactless power transmission in the kilowatt range.
A team led by Christoph Utschick and Prof. Rudolf Gross, physicists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), has developed a coil with superconducting wires capable of transmitting power in the range of more than five kilowatts contactless and with only small losses. The wide field of conceivable applications include autonomous industrial robots, medical equipment, vehicles and even aircraft.

Contactles...

Researchers have developed a way to produce holograms almost instantly. The deep learning-based method is so efficient, it could run on a smartphone, they say.

Despite years of hype, virtual reality headsets have yet to topple TV or computer screens as the go-to devices for video viewing. One reason: VR can make users feel sick. Nausea and eyestrain can result because VR creates an illusion of 3D viewing although the user is in fact staring at a fixed-distance 2D display. The solution for better 3D visualization could lie in a 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world: holograms.

Holograms deliver an exceptional representation of 3D world around us. Plus, they’re beautiful. (Go ahead — check out the holographic dove on your Visa card...

Tiny fluorescent semiconductor dots, called quantum dots, are useful in a variety of health and electronic technologies but are made of toxic, expensive metals. Nontoxic and economic carbon-based dots are easy to produce, but they emit less light. A new study that uses ultrafast nanometric imaging found good and bad emitters among populations of carbon dots. This observation suggests that by selecting only super-emitters, carbon nanodots can be purified to replace toxic metal quantum dots in many applications, the researchers said.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, brought together researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the University of Delaware, Baltimore County in a collaborative project through the Beckman ...