Category Technology/Electronics

Diagram showing how mushrooms are turned into a material for battery anodes.

Researchers have created a new type of lithium-ion battery anode using portabella mushrooms, which are inexpensive, environmentally friendly and easy to produce. Porous structure of portabella mushrooms is key to making efficient batteries that could power cell phones, electric vehicles. The current industry standard for rechargeable lithium-ion battery anodes is synthetic graphite, which comes with a high cost of manufacturing because it requires tedious purification and preparation processes that are also harmful to the environment.

UC Riverside engineers were drawn to using mushrooms as a form of biomass because past research has established they are highly porous, meaning they have a lot of small spaces for li...

Left: Schematic of the coupling of photonic crystal effect and multiple-beam interference in the CPhCs E-F-E double heterostructure; Middle and Right: Illustration and SEM image of an E-F-E double heterostructure (Scale bar is 1 μm).

Researchers report breakthrough due to novel and multi-layer colloidal photonic crystal structure. It could drive the next advances in sensor technology, energy saving and harvesting, lasers and optoelectronics...

Image obtained from scanning tunneling microscopy on a porous 3D-gold structure. Credit: Anaïs Ferris – LAAS

Micro-supercapacitors are a promising alternative to micro-batteries because of their high power and long lifetime. They have been in development for about a decade but until now they have stored considerably less energy than micro-batteries, which has limited their application. Now researchers have developed an electrode material that means electrochemical capacitors produce results similar to batteries, yet retain their particular advantages.

With the development of on-board electronic systems and wireless technologies, the miniaturization of energy storage devices has become necessary...

Speaker that grows in a piece of furniture, the shape is generated by an algorithm to suit one’s physical space. Credit: Image courtesy of Umeå universitet

Thus more meaningful products can be made for people and more value for companies. In his research, Guido Hermans has investigated a way to open up design to the consumer and how to give this group an active role in the design of everyday products. “This role change implies a shift for the professional designer from knowing what a future user would like to have towards knowing what a layperson would like to design, which is for most designers an unfamiliar way of thinking,” says Guido Hermans.

The new form of lay design is enabled by 2 developments: On the one hand, the creation of variable designs by using computational design, and ...