Category Technology/Electronics

The zinc-ion battery could help enable communities move into production of renewable solar and wind energy. Credit: Shutterstock/University of Waterloo

Chemists at the University of Waterloo have developed a long-lasting zinc-ion battery that costs half the price of current lithium-ion batteries and could help enable communities to shift away from traditional power plants and into renewable solar and wind energy production. The battery uses safe, non-flammable, non-toxic materials and a pH-neutral, water-based salt. It consists of a water-based electrolyte, a pillared vanadium oxide + electrode and an inexpensive metallic Zn – electrode...

In this series, a 3-D printed multimaterial shape-memory minigripper, consisting of shape-memory hinges and adaptive touching tips, grasps a cap screw. Credit: Photo courtesy of Qi (Kevin) Ge; Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license

Heat-responsive materials may aid in controlled drug delivery, solar panel tracking. Engineers from MIT and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) are using light to print 3D structures that “remember” their original shapes. Even after being stretched, twisted, and bent at extreme angles, the structures – from small coils and multimaterial flowers, to an inch-tall replica of the Eiffel tower – sprang back to their original forms within seconds of being heated to a certain temperature “sweet spot...

A short laser pulse travels through a diamond (black spheres) and excites electrons inside it. The strength of the excitation is measured using an attosecond ultraviolet pulse (violet). Credit: Matteo Lucchini, Copyright ETH Zurich

These insights are important for petahertz electronics of the future. Today’s electronic circuits already routinely work at frequencies of several gigahertz (a billion oscillations per second) up to terahertz (a thousand billion oscillations). Modern computers are as powerful as they are because tiny switches inside them steer electric currents in fractions of a billionth of a second...

An effective and low-cost solution for storing solar energy. Credit: © Infini Lab / 2016 EPFL

How can we store solar energy for period when the sun doesn’t shine? One solution is to convert it into hydrogen through water electrolysis. The idea is to use the electrical current produced by a solar panel to ‘split’ water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Clean hydrogen can then be stored away for future use to produce electricity on demand, or even as a fuel.

Even though different hydrogen-production technologies have given us promising results in the lab, they are still too unstable or expensive and need to be further developed to use on a commercial and large scale...