Category Technology/Electronics

Imagine pointing your smartphone at a salty snack you found at the back of your pantry and immediately knowing if its ingredients had turned rancid. Devices called spectrometers can detect dangerous chemicals based on a unique “fingerprint” of absorbed and emitted light. But these light-splitting instruments have long been both bulky and expensive, preventing their use outside the lab.

Until now. Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have developed a spectrometer that is so small and simple that it could integrate with the camera of a typical cell phone without sacrificing accuracy...

Scientists have made inroads in integrating electronic sensors with personalized 3D-printed prosthetics. With the growth of 3D printing, it’s entirely possible to 3D print your own prosthetic from models found in open-source databases. But those models lack personalized electronic user interfaces like those found in costly, state-of-the-art prosthetics.

Now, a Virginia Tech professor and his interdisciplinary team of undergraduate student researchers have made inroads in integrating electronic sensors with personalized 3D-printed prosthetics – a development that could one day lead to more affordable electric-powered prost...

Imagine being able to hear people whispering in the next room, while the raucous party in your own room is inaudible to the whisperers. Yale researchers have found a way to do just that – make sound flow in one direction – within a fundamental technology found in everything from cell phones to gravitational wave detectors.

What’s more, the researchers have used the same idea to control the flow of heat in one direction...

The difficulty in spotting minute amounts of disease circulating in the bloodstream has proven a stumbling block in the detection and treatment of cancers that advance stealthily with few symptoms. With a novel electrochemical biosensing device that identifies the tiniest signals these biomarkers emit, a pair of NJIT inventors are hoping to bridge this gap.

Their work in disease detection is an illustration of the power of electrical sensing – and the gr...