Hi-Tech News

Over the past decades, technological advances have fueled great innovation in a wide range of fields. Emerging and rapidly developing technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) systems, three-dimensional (3D) and four-dimensional (4D) printing, digital twins (i.e., virtual representations of physical objects, systems or processes) and advanced robots, are set to... Read more

Termite mounds are remarkable structures that regulate temperature, balance airflow, and maintain structural stability in some of Earth's harshest climates. And like other irregular, disordered systems, they can be difficult to replicate with modern engineering techniques.... Read more

Paintings are often made up of thousands of tiny brushstrokes, each going in a certain direction, that are not easily observed by the viewer. A cross-disciplinary research team from the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) and Loughborough University in England has developed an image analysis method... Read more

It's been said that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture." Writing, or talking, about dancing can be similarly futile. A Cornell doctoral student has helped develop a tool that lets dancers use video and extended reality (XR) headsets to create an immersive environment for analyzing and refining their... Read more

Researchers have identified previously unknown materials, including a new form of a widely studied clean-energy material, by carefully controlling and tracking how molecular precursors break down during heating.... Read more

Researchers at Seoul National University have developed a new class of ultralight structural materials that combine the load-bearing strength of engineering materials with the weight of foam. Using a method called 3D node winding, the team created mesoscale carbon fiber lattices that achieve aluminum-level performance on a strength-to-weight basis while... Read more

There is no question that violin-making is an art form. It requires a musician's ear, a craftsperson's skill, and a historian's appreciation of lessons learned over time. Making a violin also takes trust: Violin makers (luthiers) often must wait until the instrument is finished before they can hear how all... Read more

Nature is replete with slender filaments that bend and coil—from climbing grape vines, to folded proteins, to elephant trunks that can pick up a peanut but also take down a tree.... Read more

A research team led by Dr. Nam Ki-Hun at the Battery Materials and Process Research Center of the Korea Electrotechnology Research Institute (KERI) has successfully developed a nano-tin (Sn) interlayer control technology to address interfacial instability between the lithium metal anode and solid electrolyte, a critical hurdle to the commercialization... Read more

A thermoelectric generator with a shape that no human designer would likely have imagined has now been created by a computer—and it performs more than eight times better than conventional designs. Rather than relying on intuition or repeated trial and error, the breakthrough was achieved through advanced computational optimization.... Read more

Perovskite solar cells are a rapidly advancing photovoltaic technology that has seen a dramatic rise in power conversion efficiency in recent years. A key driver of this progress is the use of molecular charge-selective contacts—ultrathin interlayers only a few nanometers thick—that replace conventional bulk transport materials. These molecular layers play... Read more

Scientists are advancing a promising solution to two of the world's biggest challenges—plastic pollution and clean energy—by transforming waste plastics into valuable fuels using sunlight.... Read more

Researchers have developed an ultra-thin optical film that improves the quality of the light used in LCD resin-based 3D printers. The advance helps ensure that tiny details are reproduced with precision, which could make it possible to 3D-print medical-grade or industrial-grade products at a lower cost.... Read more

A University at Buffalo-led team has found a way to help chiral semiconductors, electronic materials whose structures are left- or right-handed like many of life's building blocks, absorb visible light. In a study published in Nature Communications, researchers chemically combined a chiral semiconducting material with a non-chiral molecule that more... Read more

DNA stores our genetic code. What if it could also be integrated with electronics to store and read other information? Scientists have been investigating how to store data in DNA, but retrieving the information remains a challenge.... Read more