Category Technology/Electronics

Modern life depends on fast and reliable wireless connections. Video calls, streaming services, virtual reality, and smart devices all place growing demands on networks that already serve billions of users. Most wireless data today travels through radio-based technologies such as Wi-Fi and cellular systems.

While these approaches have been highly successful, they face mounting challenges, including crowded radio spectrum, interference in dense indoor spaces, and rising energy consumption as more devices come online.

A promising complementary approach is optic...

While technology has made the world “smaller,” it has also pulled individuals apart, thanks to mobile phones and other devices that command our attention. Cornell University researchers are using technology, in the form of a mirror-equipped robot, to help bring people together. Members of the Architectural Robotics Lab, led by Keith Evan Green, have built a four-foot-tall robot—dubbed MirrorBot—with dual mirrors that, when placed in front of a pair of strangers, let each participant see themself in one mirror and the other person in the other.

In a study involving participants in a waiting-room setting, MirrorBot spurred conversations, playful excha...

The electronics inside your phone, your car, and every satellite currently orbiting Earth share one critical weakness: heat. Push them past about 200 degrees Celsius and they start to fail. For decades, that thermal ceiling has been one of the hardest walls in engineering. Now a team at the University of Southern California may have just found a way around it.

In a study published in Science, researchers led by Joshua Yang, Arthur B...

A new study from the University of Chicago taps an ingredient most often used in the lithium-ion batteries that power our devices to open new avenues in biomedical technology. Lithium plays vital roles in the body, but taking it orally can have unwanted side effects—so a pair of UChicago chemistry labs teamed up to find a way to deliver lithium only to the exact places where it’s needed.

Their study, published in Nature Materials, could be the foundation for future biomedical technologies to treat p...