Category Technology/Electronics

The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce (AFP Photo/John F. Williams)

A sci-fi staple for decades, laser weapons are finally becoming reality in the US military, albeit with capabilities a little less dramatic than at the movies. Lightsabers—the favored weapon of the Jedi in “Star Wars” films—will remain in the fictional realm for now, but after decades of development, laser weapons are now here and are being deployed on military vehicles and planes. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon—all the big defense players—are developing prototypes for the Pentagon. The Navy has since 2014 been testing a 30-kilowatt laser on one of its warships, the USS Ponce.

Lockheed Martin has just announced a 60-kilowatt laser weapon ...

Prof Jonathan Coleman and team have fabricated printed transistors consisting entirely of 2-dimensional nanomaterials for the first time. Credit: AMBER, Trinity College Dublin

Researchers in AMBER, the Science Foundation Ireland-funded materials science research centre hosted in Trinity College Dublin, have fabricated printed transistors consisting entirely of 2D nanomaterials for the first time. These 2D materials combine exciting electronic properties with the potential for low-cost production. This breakthrough could unlock the potential for applications such as food packaging that displays a digital countdown to warn you of spoiling, wine labels that alert you when your white wine is at its optimum temperature, or even a window pane that shows the day’s forecast.

This discovery opens t...

This is an artist’s impression of carbon nanotubes wrapped in polymers with thiol side chains (yellow spheres) and assembled on gold electrodes.
Credit: Arjen Kamp

Carbon nanotubes can be used to make very small electronic devices, but they are difficult to handle. University of Groningen scientists, together with colleagues from the University of Wuppertal and IBM Zurich, have developed a method to select semiconducting nanotubes from a solution and make them self-assemble on a circuit of gold electrodes. University of Groningen Professor Maria Antonietta Loi designed polymers which wrap themselves around specific carbon nanotubes in a solution of mixed tubes. Thiol side chains on the polymer bind the tubes to the gold electrodes, creating the resultant transistor.

‘In our previous work, ...

A new material not only heals itself, but it also stretches up to 50 times its usual size; these properties could fix your phone’s battery if it cracks or prevent it from breaking in the first place. Credit: Wang lab

Taking a cue from the Marvel Universe, researchers report that they have developed a self-healing polymeric material with an eye toward electronics and soft robotics that can repair themselves. The material is stretchable and transparent, conducts ions to generate current and could one day help your broken smartphone go back together again.

“When I was young, my idol was Wolverine from the X-Men,” Chao Wang, Ph.D., says. “He could save the world, but only because he could heal himself...