Category Technology/Electronics

1. The northern clingfish (Gobiesox maeandricus) lives in Pacific Northwest waters, where it seeks out prey in the crashing waves of the intertidal Credit: Petra Ditsche 2. Credit: Christina Linkem

To create prototype suction cups that are capable of glomming onto rough, wet surfaces and staying there, Ditsche has found inspiration in clingfish. On the rocky shores of Washington State, clingfish maneuver over rocks to prey on limpets – dime-sized, snail-like invertebrates. A limpet is covered by a shell shield that hides soft organs, which are fair game if the predatory clingfish can pop it off the rock. Yet the clingfish faces its own foe: heavy forces from incoming waves that threaten to slosh it off the rocks as it searches for food...

A new modular compute platform called the Compute Card

We may be about to enter a brand new age of tiny computing. Tech blog MSPoweruser said on Thursday that “At CES 2017 today, Intel announced a new modular compute platform called the Compute Card.” A BBC presenter points in the video to a “fully functional Windows 10 PC. “And when I say this, I actually mean this.” He reaches for a small slab, and tells viewers that it is a complete computer. Processer, storage, memory, Wifi, there. “It is about as powerful as an ultra-thin laptop,” he said.

The Intel Compute Card can operate as a PC or act as the brains of other electronics. The card does not seem to have—anywhere to plug anything in...

A researcher demonstrates the efficacy of a flexible transistor, as it is stretched, twisted and poked. Credit: J. Xu et al., Science (2016)

Researchers have created a stretchy transistor that can be elongated to twice its length with only minimal changes in its conductivity. The development is a valuable advancement for the field of wearable electronics. To date, it has been difficult to design a transistor using inherently stretchable materials that maintains its conductivity upon being stretched. Jie Xu devised a clever and scalable way to confine organic conductors inside a rubbery polymer to create stretchy transistors. They took a semiconducting polymer, called DPPT-TT, and confined it inside another polymer, SEBS, which has elastic properties.

As the two polymers don’t like to mix w...

This is the newly-developed hetero-type dual photoelectrodes by Professor Jae Sung Lee and Professor Ji-Wook Jang’s joint reserach team. Credit: UNIST

An international team with UNIST has engineered a new artificial leaf that can convert sunlight into fuel with groundbreaking efficiency. In the study, the research presented a hetero-type dual photoelectrodes, in which 2 photoanodes of different bandgaps are connected in parallel for extended light harvesting. Their new artificial leaf mimics the natural process of underwater photosynthesis of aquatic plants to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which can be harvested for fuel.

This study is expected to contribute greatly to the reduction and treatment of carbon dioxide emissions in accordance with the recent Paris Agreement on climate c...