Hi Tech & Innovation news

Electronics & Semiconductors

Monolayer WSe₂ unlocks high-performance p-type transistors that could change how future chips balance speed and power

Transistors, small devices that can amplify or switch electrical signals, are central components of all modern computer chips and digital devices. There are two main types of transistors, known as n-type and p-type transistors.

Energy & Green Tech

Water locked in 1-nanometer channels could enable safer energy storage

Can pure water store electrical energy? A research team led by Dr. Vasily Artemov within the Cluster of Excellence "BlueMat—Water-Driven Materials" at Hamburg University of Technology has now shown that it can. By confining ...

Engineering

Inclined kirigami cuts unlock twist when stretched, opening path to soft robots

Kirigami is a variation on the Japanese art of origami, or paper folding, in which cuts are used to create three-dimensional structures—for example, pop-up cards created from a sheet of paper. Kirigami also has applications ...

Electronics & Semiconductors

Ultrathin diamond layer boosts performance of high-power electronics

The silicon that forms the foundation of most computer chips has fundamental limits to how much power it can manage, which constrains the speed and energy-efficiency of wireless communication systems. A promising solution ...

Engineering

Jumping spiders inspire ultra-efficient 3D camera

By borrowing a trick from tiny jumping spiders, Northwestern University engineers have developed an extremely energy-efficient 3D camera. Called SpiderCam, the new device senses depth the same way that jumping spiders judge ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

Europe opening up to self-driving taxis

Self-driving taxis, already booming in the United States and China, are emerging in Europe, with major companies launching trials this year in several capitals and the European Union set to step on the accelerator Monday.

Hardware

Real-time X-ray compression shrinks file size by 8,000 times

Researchers led by Takaki Hatsui at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center (RSC) in Japan and collaborators have developed a new approach to compressing X-ray imaging data in real time, reducing the size of data files by more than 8,000 ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

AI brings object-level vision prosthetics closer to reality

EPFL researchers are developing AI models that could one day enable vision prosthetics able to restore meaningful, object-level sight for the blind. The research, from the NeuroAI Lab of Martin Schrimpf, part of EPFL's Schools ...

Energy & Green Tech

Smart building skins and eco-friendly hydrogen production technology

The JC STEM Lab of Circular Bio-economy (the Lab) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) has recently achieved a breakthrough in the field of sustainable development technologies. A research team led by Professor Lee Duu-Jong, ...

Energy & Green Tech

Wood bark-based coating delivers pilot run for paper packaging

In the COCOBIN project, coordinated by the University of Oulu, coating materials are being developed from suberin, a natural compound found, for example, in birch bark. In plants, suberin acts as a protective layer and prevents ...

Engineering

Efficiently cooling satellite components in space

Space is a vacuum. Heat therefore cannot be transferred to the surroundings by thermal conduction. This poses a problem for any type of space-capable electronics, which can quickly overheat under these conditions. The only ...

Engineering

Underground acoustic signals reveal hidden tunnels

For decades, engineers have searched for underground tunnels by sending signals from the surface downward—an approach that can miss what lies below. By reversing that approach, researchers at the Department of Energy's (DOE) ...

Engineering

New technology for smarter indirect Time-of-Flight cameras

Researchers from Kyushu University and DENSO IT Laboratory, Inc. have developed a new method to improve the accuracy of indirect Time-of-Flight (I-ToF) cameras. The technology considers the practical limitations of real-world ...