News by Subject Technology & Engineering

A research team from the University of Zurich has developed a new drone that can retract its propeller arms in flight and make itself small to fit through narrow gaps and holes. This is particularly useful when searching for victims of natural disasters.

Farmers can already use drones to soar over huge fields and monitor temperature, humidity or crop health. But these machines need so much power to fly that they can't get very far without needing a charge. Now, engineers at the University of Washington have created a sensing system that is small enough to ride aboard a bumblebee.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Pontedera (Pisa, Italy), discovered that living plants are literally 'green' power source: they can generate, by a single leaf, more than 150 Volts, enough to simultaneously power 100 LED light bulbs. Researchers also showed that an 'hybrid tree' made of natural and artificial leaves can act as an innovative 'green' electrical generator converting wind into electricity.

New 'classification models' sense how well humans trust intelligent machines they collaborate with, a step toward improving the quality of interactions and teamwork.

A research team at Osaka University created a system that uses a convolutional neural network to learn the features distinguishing different cancer cells, based on images from a phase-contrast microscope. This system accurately differentiated human and mouse cancer cells, as well as their radioresistant clones. This novel approach can improve the speed and accuracy of cancer diagnosis by avoiding the laboriousness and potential errors associated with equivalent analyses by humans.

Geckos are amazingly agile. In addition to running across land and up trees, the animals can prance across the surface of water. A new study reveals how they do it.

Producing realistic animated film figures is a highly complex technical endeavour. ETH researchers have now shown how drones can be used to greatly reduce the effort required in the process.