Hi-Tech News

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are becoming increasingly common on roadways, but making them as safe as possible may entail going beyond the particular specs of the vehicles themselves to upgrading the roadway infrastructure. EyeDAR, a low-power millimeter-wave radar sensor roughly the size of an orange, could provide radar-equipped AVs with critical... Read more

Around the world, scientists are exploring an unexpected solution to the growing data crisis: storing digital information in synthetic DNA. The idea is simple but powerful—DNA is one of the most compact, durable information systems on Earth. But one issue has held the field back. Once data is written into... Read more

Faster, more secure connections from space could one day make broadband on planes, ships and even remote roads as easy as turning on a light. The European Space Agency (ESA), Airbus Defense and Space, the Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) and German payload manufacturer TESAT (as subcontractor) successfully... Read more

BYU engineers had so much fun working with Mark Rober to create the "world's smallest Nerf blaster," they continued the work to see how big they could make it. The micro ant-blaster has become a mega launcher with the same flexible, single-body design.... Read more

Traditional industrial tomographs reach their physical limits when it comes to large volumes and high radiography requirements. Fraunhofer IIS's XXL CT system, built in 2013, is considered the world's only publicly accessible facility capable of scanning entire vehicles and freight containers, but this system requires complex handling of the test... Read more

Roughly 270 years ago, Dr. Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost from Germany observed a peculiar behavior of water droplets on heated metal surfaces. In his manuscript, "A Tract About Some Qualities of Common Water," he described how water skated over superheated metal surfaces as though friction had ceased to exist. This occurs... Read more

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has created a magnetostrictive transducer (MST) probe that uses ultrasonic guided wave technology to detect corrosion in storage tanks, a process that normally requires emptying the tank and checking for corrosion manually. SwRI's probe attaches to the outside of a storage tank, resulting in a more... Read more

Emergency evacuations during natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis increasingly rely on advanced technology to effectively assess real-time crowd movement and points of congestion. Disaster-preparedness involves the development of an optimized technology that is easy to use and interpret.... Read more

A new material can store energy from sunlight and convert it into hydrogen days later. The material, jointly developed by researchers from Ulm and Jena, can do this even in the dark. The process is reversible and can be reactivated several times using a pH switch. The results are published... Read more

E pluribus unum—"out of many, one"—is not only a motto for the United States; it's a good credo for microrobots. A research collaboration between Cornell and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has shown how a swarm of microrobots spinning on a water surface can together generate the fluidic... Read more

Pyrochlore oxides—a class of advanced dielectric materials—represent a promising next-generation approach to efficient energy storage. Their structural flexibility and tunable chemical composition make them prime candidates for dielectric energy storage applications.... Read more

Enzymatic biofuel cells can act as self-powered wearable biosensors by converting chemicals in body fluids into electricity; however, manufacturing challenges have prevented their widespread adoption. Now, researchers from Japan have developed water-based 'enzyme inks' that enable single-step screen printing of complete biofuel cells onto paper substrates. The printed electrodes demonstrated... Read more

Researchers at The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) have developed a multi-source co-evaporation recipe that markedly enhances the crystal quality of vacuum-deposited perovskite films. This advance brings all vacuum-deposited single-junction perovskite cells as well as perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells closer to scalable production. The research has been... Read more

A team from the Institute of Materials Science of Seville (ICMS), a joint center of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Seville (US), has developed a new hybrid device that allows energy to be captured from both the sun and rain simultaneously. A thin film created... Read more

DNA, the genetic blueprints in every living organism, is nature's most efficient storage mechanism, capable of storing about 215 million gigabytes of data per gram. That storage capacity, if applied to electronics, could enable significantly more efficient data centers, speedier data processing and the ability to process far more complicated... Read more