Category Technology/Electronics

Waste fish scales (upper left corner) are used to fabricate flexible nanogenerator (lower left) that power up more than 50 blue LEDs (lower right). An enlarged microscopic view of a fish scale shows the well-aligned collagen fibrils (upper right). The possibility of making a fish scale transparent (middle) and rollable (extreme left lower corner) is also illustrated. Credit: Sujoy Kuman Ghosh and Dipankar Mandal/Jadavpur University

Large quantities of fish are consumed in India on a daily basis, which generates a huge amount of fish “biowaste” materials. In an attempt to do something positive with this biowaste, a team of researchers at Jadavpur University in Koltata, India explored recycling the fish byproducts into an energy harvester for self-powered electronics...

Two become one: various diffraction patterns showing Rayleigh’s criterion

A team of researchers with the National University of Singapore has found a way to get around what they describe as ‘Rayleigh’s curse’—a phenomenon that happens when 2 light sources appear to coalesce as they grow closer together, limiting ability to measure the distance between them.

For many years, scientists working in a variety of fields studying the stars through a telescope or objects through a microscope have been limited by the same problem—diffraction interfering with light sources that are very close together—the wave-like nature of light causes spreading, which in turn can cause an overlap of photons striking a surface meant to be used to measure the difference between two sources.

Back in the late 1...

The UW–Madison engineers use a solution process to deposit aligned arrays of carbon nanotubes onto 1 inch by 1 inch substrates. The researchers used their scalable and rapid deposition process to coat the entire surface of this substrate with aligned carbon nanotubes in less than 5 minutes. The team’s breakthrough could pave the way for carbon nanotube transistors to replace silicon transistors, and is particularly promising for wireless communications technologies. STEPHANIE PRECOURT

For decades, scientists have tried to harness the unique properties of carbon nanotubes to create high-performance electronics that are faster or consume less power – resulting in longer battery life, faster wireless communication and faster processing speeds for devices like smartphones and laptops...

This is a conceptual illustration of pattern recognition process performed by hybrid gel oscillator system. Credit: Yan Fang

The potential to develop “materials that compute” has taken another leap at the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering, where researchers for the first time have demonstrated that the material can be designed to recognize simple patterns. This responsive, hybrid material, powered by its own chemical reactions, could one day be integrated into clothing and used to monitor the human body, or developed as a skin for “squishy” robots.

The computations were modeled utilizing Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) gels, a substance that oscillates in the absence of external stimuli, with an overlaying piezoelectric (PZ) cantilever. These BZ-PZ units combine Dr...