Category Technology/Electronics

This is an artist’s rendering of P22-Hyd, a new biomaterial created by encapsulating a hydrogen-producing enzyme within a virus shell. Credit: Indiana University

Combining bacterial genes, virus shell creates a highly efficient, renewable material used in generating power from water. A modified enzyme that gains strength from being protected within the protein shell, “capsid” – of a bacterial virus, this new material is 150X more efficient than the unaltered form of the enzyme.

“Essentially, we’ve taken a virus’s ability to self-assemble myriad genetic building blocks and incorporated a very fragile and sensitive enzyme with the remarkable property of taking in protons and spitting out hydrogen gas,” said Prof. Trevor Douglas...

Sandia National Laboratories technician Eric Breden installs a transmission cable on the silver disk that is the new pulsed-power machine’s central powerflow assembly. Credit: Randy Montoya

A new Sandia National Laboratories accelerator called Thor is expected to be 40X more efficient than Sandia’s Z machine, the world’s largest and most powerful pulsed-power accelerator, in generating pressures to study materials under extreme conditions.”Thor’s magnetic field will reach about one million atmospheres, about the pressures at Earth’s core,” said David Reisman, lead theoretical physicist.

Though unable to match Z’s 5 million atmospheres, the completed Thor will be smaller—2,000 rather than 10,000 square feet—and will be considerably more efficient due to design improvements that use hundre...

Human computation (HC), which encompasses methods such as crowdsourcing, citizen science, and distributed knowledge collection offers new promise for addressing wicked problems, by enabling participatory sensing, group intelligence, and collective action at unprecedented scales.

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the “wicked” problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University. They present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pa...

HyQ2 is a quadruped that has been in high focus at the Italian Institute of Technology’s Dynamic Legged Systems lab. They have been getting it disaster-ready for search and rescue missions and for environment disasters.

This DLS lab makes high-performance, versatile legged robots. Their torque-controlled hydraulic quadruped robot HyQ is their flagship platform. They need to know if the robot can get back on its feet even if it is completely knocked over. The HyQ robot was developed at the IIT in Genoa. The lab works on achieving accurate hydraulic force/ torque control at the joint level. They explore a variety of different locomotion gaits, strong enough to withstand external disturbances and changing environmental conditions.

A significant part of our groups’ effort is devoted to percept...