Category Technology/Electronics

This is the RMIT-developed proton battery connected to a voltmeter. The working prototype has an energy per unit mass already comparable with commercially-available lithium ion batteries. Credit: RMIT University

Working prototype could eventually replace lithum ion batteries. Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia have demonstrated for the first time a working rechargeable “proton battery” that could re-wire how we power our homes, vehicles and devices. The rechargeable battery is environmentally friendly, and has the potential, with further development, to store more energy than currently-available lithium ion batteries.

Potential applications for the proton battery include household storage of electricity from solar photovoltaic panels, as done currently by the Tesla ‘P...

Electrical engineers at the University of Delaware developed their version of smart glass technology. It starts opaque but turns transparent when filled with index-matching fluid, as shown in the bottom portion of this pane. Credit: University of Delaware

Engineers develop eco-friendly panels that switch from transparent to opaque. New ‘smart glass’ technology could make curtains and blinds obsolete and provide an instant toggle between light and dark for windshields and roof panes. While this isn’t the first ‘smart glass’ ever developed, it is about one-tenth the price of other versions and more transparent in its transparent state and more reflective in its reflective state than competitors...

Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang poses with an array of 1,000 LED lights that can be illuminated by power produced by the force of a shoe striking a triboelectric generator placed on the floor. Credit: Rob Felt

Researchers have discovered more details about the way certain materials hold a static charge even after two surfaces separate, information that could help improve devices that leverage such energy as a power source. While the effects of static electricity have been fascinating casual observers and scientists for millennia, certain aspects of how the electricity is generated and stored on surfaces have remained a mystery.

Now, researchers have discovered more details about the way certain materials hold a charge even after two surfaces separate, information that could help impr...

Illustration of the non-line-of-sight imaging system. Credit: Stanford Computational Imaging Lab

Someday your self-driving car could react to hazards before you even see them, thanks to a laser-based imaging technology that can peek around corners. It sounds like magic but the idea of non-line-of-sight imaging is actually feasible,” said Gordon Wetzstein, assistant professor of electrical engineering and senior author of the paper describing this work, published March 5 in Nature.

The Stanford group isn’t alone in developing methods for bouncing lasers around corners to capture images of objects. Where this research advances the field is in the extremely efficient and effective algorithm the researchers developed to process the final image...