Category Technology/Electronics

High-Flying Experiments Demonstrate Potential of Balloon-Borne Infrasound Detection

Experiments conducted high in the skies over New Mexico suggest that balloon-borne sensors could be useful in detecting the infrasound signals generated by small, extraterrestrial debris entering Earth’s atmosphere, according to a report at the 2017 Seismological Society of America’s (SSA) Annual Meeting. Infrasound, sometimes called low-frequency sound, is sound waves that occur at frequencies lower than the limit of human hearing. Infrasound signals can remain strong as they travel over large distances, making them useful for pinpointing the location and size of events such as nuclear explosions, meteorite strikes, volcanic eruptions and sometimes earthquake ruptures.

Ground sensors can detect these signa...

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...