Category Technology/Electronics

Sculpting Super-fast Light Pulses

Schematic shows a novel technique to reshape the properties of an ultrafast light pulse. An incoming pulse of light (left) is dispersed into its various constituent frequencies, or colors, and directed into a metasurface composed of millions of tiny silicon pillars and an integrated polarizer. The nanopillars are specifically designed to simultaneously and independently shape such properties of each frequency component as its amplitude, phase or polarization. The transmitted beam is then recombined to achieve a new shape-modified pulse (right).
Credit: S. Kelley/NIST

Nanopillars shape light precisely for practical applications...

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Self-Powered Wearable Tech

For emerging wearable tech to advance, it needs improved power sources. Now researchers from Michigan State University have provided a potential solution via crumpled carbon nanotube forests, or CNT forests.
Credit: Courtesy of MSU

For emerging wearable tech to advance, it needs improved power sources. Now researchers from Michigan State University have provided a potential solution via crumpled carbon nanotube forests, or CNT forests.

Changyong Cao, director of MSU’s Soft Machines and Electronics Laboratory, led a team of scientists in creating highly stretchable supercapacitors for powering wearable electronics...

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Storing Info in Molecules, for Millions of Years

Pairing molecule mass and binary code, the Whitesides team can "write" massive amounts of data
Pairing molecule mass and binary code, the Whitesides team can “write” massive amounts of data
Credit: Michael J. Fink

As the data boom continues to boom, more and more information gets filed in less and less space. Even the cloud will eventually run out of space, can’t thwart all hackers, and gobbles up energy. Now, a new way to store information could stably house data for millions of years, lives outside the hackable internet, and, once written, uses no energy. All you need is a chemist, some cheap molecules, and your precious information.

“Think storing the contents of the New York Public Library with a teaspoon of protein,” says Brian Cafferty, first author on the paper that describes the new technique and a postdoctoral scholar in the lab of George Whitesides, the Woodford L...

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Record Solar Hydrogen production with concentrated Sunlight

Figure 2

Illustration of the integrated PEC device.

Researchers have created a smart device capable of producing large amounts of clean hydrogen. By concentrating sunlight, their device uses a smaller amount of the rare, costly materials that are required to produce hydrogen, yet it still maintains a high solar-to-fuel efficiency. Their research has been taken to the next scale with a pilot facility installed on the EPFL campus.

Scientists at EPFL’s Laboratory of Renewable Energy Science and Engineering (LRESE) came up with the idea of concentrating solar irradiation to produce a larger amount of hydrogen over a given area at a lower cost...

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