Category Technology/Electronics

A newly developed wing architecture could greatly simplify the manufacturing process and reduce fuel consumption by improving the wing’s aerodynamics. It is based on a system of tiny, lightweight subunits that could be assembled by a team of small specialized robots, and could ultimately be used to build the entire airframe. Credit: Kenneth Cheung/NASA

High-tech wizardry by MIT and NASA engineers will allow some aircraft to return to their roots, with a new kind of bendable, “morphing” wing. Wright brothers accomplished their first powered flight more than a century ago, and controlled the motion of their Flyer 1 aircraft using wires and pulleys that bent and twisted the wood-and-canvas wings...

Ruichen Wang with the prototype. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Huddersfield

Boosting the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles by “harvesting” the energy generated by their shock absorbers and feeding it back into batteries or electrical systems such as air conditioning has become a major goal in automotive engineering. Now, a University of Huddersfield researcher has made a breakthrough by designing a new system and constructing a prototype that is ready for real-world testing.

Considerable work has already been done harvesting energy from brake systems, so Dr Wang decided to focus on the suspension...

A figure depicting the structure of stacked memristors with dimensions that could satisfy the Feynman Grand Challenge

In 1959 Richard Feynman, in his talk “Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” spoke of a future in which tiny machines could perform huge feats. Like many forward-looking concepts, his molecule and atom-sized world remained for years in the realm of science fiction. And then, scientists and other creative thinkers began to realize Feynman’s nanotechnological visions. In the spirit of Feynman’s insight engineers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a design for a functional nanoscale computing device. The concept involves a dense, 3D circuit operating on an unconventional type of logic that could, theoretically, be packed into a block no bigger than 50 nm on any side.

Key to this devel...