Hi Tech & Innovation news

Engineering

New design tool 3D-prints woven metamaterials that stretch and fail predictably

Metamaterials—materials whose properties are primarily dictated by their internal microstructure, and not their chemical makeup—have been redefining the engineering materials space for the last decade. To date, however, ...

Energy & Green Tech

Fungi turn shredded mattress foam into lightweight building insulation

Swinburne researchers have turned old, unwanted mattresses into safe and sustainable building insulation materials using fungi. The team grew a common fungus together with shredded mattress foam to create a new material that ...

Engineering

Octopus-inspired 'smart skin' uses 4D printing to morph on cue

Despite the prevalence of synthetic materials across different industries and scientific fields, most are developed to serve a limited set of functions. To address this inflexibility, researchers at Penn State, led by Hongtao ...

Energy & Green Tech

Oxygen-modified graphene filters boost natural gas purification

As we shift toward more sustainable fuels, natural gas and biogas, which mainly contain methane (CH4), have become important sources of energy and raw materials for chemical production. However, these gases also contain impurities ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

New AI system fixes 3D printing defects in real time

Additive manufacturing has revolutionized manufacturing by enabling customized, cost-effective products with minimal waste. However, with the majority of 3D printers operating on open-loop systems, they are notoriously prone ...

Energy & Green Tech

Electric eel biology inspires powerful gel battery

Power sources used in devices found in or around biological tissue must be flexible and nontoxic, while still powerful enough to support demanding technologies such as medical devices or soft robotics. To achieve this balance, ...

Software

New dataset for smarter 3D printing released

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Peregrine software, used to monitor and analyze parts created through powder bed additive manufacturing, has released its most advanced dataset to date.

Robotics

Smart microrobots learn to communicate and collaborate in water

In a major step toward intelligent and collaborative microrobotic systems, researchers at the Research Center for Materials, Architectures and Integration of Nanomembranes (MAIN) at Chemnitz University of Technology have ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

Unique fingerprints in 3D printing may foil adversaries

3D printing is a simple way to create custom tools, replacement pieces and other helpful objects, but it is also being used to create untraceable firearms, such as ghost guns, like the one implicated in the late 2024 killing ...

Energy & Green Tech

Nuclear waste could be a source of fuel in future reactors

From electric cars to artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, the technologies people use every day require a growing need for electricity. In theory, nuclear fusion—a process that fuses atoms together, releasing heat ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

Brain cells learn faster than machine learning, research reveals

Researchers have demonstrated that brain cells learn faster and carry out complex networking more effectively than machine learning by comparing how both a Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI) system known as "DishBrain" ...

Robotics

Tiny robots use sound to self-organize into intelligent groups

Animals like bats, whales and insects have long used acoustic signals for communication and navigation. Now, an international team of scientists has taken a page from nature's playbook to model micro-sized robots that use ...