Category Technology/Electronics

This illustration shows how hexagonal bacterial proteins (shown as ribbon-like structures at right and upper right) self-assemble into a honeycomb-like tiled pattern (center and background). This tiling activity, seen with an atomic-resolution microscope (upper left), represents the early formation of polyhedral, soccer-ball-like structures known as bacterial microcompartments or BCMs that serve as tiny factories for a range of specialized activities. Credit: Berkeley Lab

Scientists have for the first time viewed how bacterial proteins self-assemble into thin sheets and begin to form the walls of the outer shell for nano-sized polyhedral compartments that function as specialized factories...

PNNL’s all-organic aqueous flow battery uses two inexpensive and readily available electrolytes, one containing methyl viologen and another with 4-HO-TEMPO.

Organic battery will be 60% cheaper than standard vanadium flow battery. The organic aqueous flow battery is expected to cost $180 per kilowatt-hour once the technology is fully developed. The lower cost is due to the battery’s active materials being inexpensive organic molecules, compared to the commodity metals used in today’s flow batteries.

“Moving from transition metal elements to synthesized molecules is a significant advancement because it links battery costs to manufacturing rather than commodity metals pricing” said Imre Gyuk...

This is an example of SegNet in action: the separate components of the road scene are all labelled in real time. Credit: Alex Kendall

New smartphone-based system could accelerate development of driverless cars. 2 newly-developed systems for driverless cars can identify a user’s location and orientation in places where GPS does not function, and identify the various components of a road scene in real time on a regular camera or smartphone, performing the same job as sensors costing tens of thousands of pounds.

Although the systems cannot currently control a driverless car, the ability to make a machine ‘see’ and accurately identify where it is and what it’s looking at is a vital part of developing autonomous vehicles and robotics...

This image shows a selective actuation of the side arms of a soft robot in a horizontal uniform magnetic field. Credit: Sumeet Mishra, North Carolina State University

The ability to control the motion of soft robots, coupled with flexibility, gives them potential applications ranging from biomedical technologies to manufacturing processes. Researchers are interested in using magnetic fields to control the movement of these soft robots because it can be done remotely – the control can be exerted without physically connecting to the polymer – and because magnetic fields are easily obtained from permanent magnets and electromagnets.

A team of researchers has now found a way of embedding long chains of nanoscale magnetite particles in sheets of elastic polymer to form a magnetic polymer nanoco...