Category Technology/Electronics

A lattice created by a multi-material 3-D printer at Georgia Institute of Technology that can permanently expand to eight times its original width after exposure to heat. Credit: Rob Felt

A team of researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology and two other institutions has developed a new 3D printing method to create objects that can permanently transform into a range of different shapes in response to heat. The team, which included researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Xi’an Jiaotong University in China, created the objects by printing layers of shape memory polymers with each layer designed to respond differently when exposed to heat.

“This new approach significantly simplifies and increases the potential of 4D printing by incorporating the mec...

Researchers have developed a paper-based device inspired by the Chinese and Japanese arts of paper-cutting that can harvest and store energy from body movements. Credit: American Chemical Society

Despite the many advances in portable electronic devices, one thing remains constant: the need to plug them into a wall socket to recharge. Now researchers, reporting in the journal ACS Nano, have developed a light-weight, paper-based device inspired by the Chinese and Japanese arts of paper-cutting that can harvest and store energy from body movements.

Portable electronic devices, such as watches, hearing aids and heart monitors, often require only a little energy. They usually get that power from conventional rechargeable batteries...

A schematic of an interpocket paired state, one of two topological superconducting states proposed in the latest work from the lab of Eun-Ah Kim, associate professor of physics at Cornell University. The material used is a monolayer transition metal dichalcogenide. Credit: Eun-Ah Kim, Cornell University

The experimental realization of ultrathin graphene – which earned two scientists from Cambridge the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010 – has ushered in a new age in materials research. What started with graphene has evolved to include numerous related single-atom-thick materials, which have unusual properties due to their ultra-thinness...

A visual of data collected by the Compact Muon Solenoid detector during a proton-lead collision at the Large Hadron Collider in 2016. Credit: Image courtesy of Thomas McCauley/CERN

Physicists probe exotic state of nuclear matter at Europe’s LHC. Findings from Rice University physicists working at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are providing new insight about an exotic state of matter, “quark-gluon plasma” that occurs when protons and neutrons melt. LHC is able to smash together the nuclei of atoms at nearly the speed of the light. The energy released in these collisions is vast and allows physicists to recreate the hot, dense conditions that existed in the early universe...