Category Technology/Electronics

A type of battery first invented nearly five decades ago could catapult to the forefront of energy storage technologies, thanks to a new finding by researchers at MIT. Credit: Illustration modified from an original image by Felice Frankel

A new battery technology, based on a metal-mesh membrane and electrodes made of molten sodium and nickel chloride, could open the way for more intermittent, renewable power sources on the grid. It could make wind and solar capable of delivering reliable baseload electricity...

“Imagine if someone were to fine-tune our system so that you could get 85 percent of the carbon and nitrogen back from waste into protein without having to use hydroponics or artificial light,” said House. “That would be a fantastic development for deep-space travel.” Image: Space Toilet © iStock Photo ALJ1

A Penn State team has shown that it is possible to rapidly break down solid and liquid waste to grow food with a series of microbial reactors, while simultaneously minimizing pathogen growth. “We envisioned and tested the concept of simultaneously treating astronauts’ waste with microbes while producing a biomass that is edible either directly or indirectly depending on safety concerns,” said Christopher House, professor of geosciences, Penn State...

Student Erich Nygaard is depicted as a 3-D volumetric image, mimicking the popular Princess Leia hologram. Credit: Dan Smalley Lab

Nature study outlines method to make the images of science fiction. In the original Star Wars film, R2D2 projects an image of Princess Leia in distress. The iconic scene includes the line still famous 40 years later: “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” BYU electrical and computer engineering professor and holography expert Daniel Smalley has long had a goal to create the same type of 3D image projection. In a paper published this week in Nature, Smalley details the method he has developed to do so. “We refer to this colloquially as the Princess Leia project,” Smalley said...

Modulator researchers. Credit: Image courtesy of Oregon State University

Researchers at Oregon State University have designed and fabricated the world’s smallest electro-optic modulator, which could mean major reductions in energy used by data centers and supercomputers. An electro-optic modulator plays the key role in fiber optic networks. Just as a transistor is a switch for electronic signals, an electro-optic modulator is a switch for optical signals. Optical communication uses light, so the modulator turns on and off the light that sends a stream of binary signals over optical fibers.

The new modulator is 10 times smaller and can potentially be 100X more energy efficient than the best previous devices. It is roughly the size of a bacterium, measuring 0.6 by 8 microns...