News by Subject Technology & Engineering

NIST scientists have designed a vacuum gauge, based on ultracold trapped atoms, is small enough to deploy in commonly used vacuum chambers.

Collapsible dog bowls and bendable straws seem to work on a common principle, snapping into stable and useful states, but mechanisms have remained elusive. Now a team led by polymer scientists at UMass Amherst discuss how 'pre-stress' built into the structure helps them function.

A study led by Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has shown that carbon fibers can work as battery electrodes, storing energy directly. This opens up new opportunities for structural batteries, where the carbon fiber becomes part of the energy system. The use of this type of multifunctional material can contribute to a significant weight-reduction in the aircraft and vehicles of the future -- a key challenge for electrification.

A study of dandelion seeds in motion has revealed a form of flight not seen before, and explains why the plant is among nature's best fliers.

For decades researchers have studied materials from structures to see why and how they fail. Before catastrophic failure, there are individual cracks or dislocations that form, which are signals that a structure may be weakening. While researchers have studied individual dislocations in the past, a team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Tennessee, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory has made it possible to understand how dislocations organize and react at nanoscale.

A battery-free energy harvester, a novel conductive system for smartwatches, and a prototype that extends body language to the human ear feature at new tech conference.

Graphene Flagship industrial and academic partners published a new paper in Nature Reviews Materials analysing the possibilities of graphene in the internet of everything market, expected to reach over 12 billion connected devices in 2020