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Energy & Green Tech

Researchers create massive open dataset to advance AI solutions for carbon capture

To avoid catastrophic climate impacts, excessive carbon emissions must be addressed. At this point, cutting emissions isn't enough. Direct air capture, a technology that pulls carbon dioxide out of ambient air, has great ...

Engineering

Researchers find use of olivine in cement production could result in carbon negative concrete

A small team of materials scientists and environmental engineers at Imperial College London has found that using olivine in cement could result in carbon-negative concrete. In their study, published in the journal Royal Society ...

Energy & Green Tech

A new roadmap to close the carbon cycle

A major approach to achieving net-zero carbon emissions relies on converting various parts of the economy, such as personal vehicles and heating, to run via electricity generated from renewable sources. But carbon cannot ...

Robotics

A miniature wireless robot that can effectively move through tubular structures

Robots have already proved to be promising tools to complete complex and demanding maintenance tasks. While engineers have developed a wide range of robots that could help to maintain and repair infrastructure, many of these ...

Robotics

Paper power: Origami technology makes its way into quadcopters

Over the past decade, researchers all around the world have been finding new and exciting use cases for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Commonly called "drones," UAVs have proved their worth across many fields, including ...

Robotics

Trotting robots reveal emergence of animal gait transitions

A four-legged robot trained with machine learning by EPFL researchers has learned to avoid falls by spontaneously switching between walking, trotting, and pronking—a milestone for roboticists as well as biologists interested ...

Robotics

A six-armed robot for precision pollination

Over the past decades, dozens of animal species have become extinct, while thousands of others are now at risk of disappearing. Endangered species include various pollinators, including bees and some types of moths, butterflies, ...

Robotics

People, not design features, make a robot social

It takes a village to nurture social robots. Researchers who develop social robots—ones that people interact with—focus too much on design features and not enough on sociological factors, like human-to-human interactions, ...

Energy & Green Tech

An ultralow-concentration electrolyte for lithium-ion batteries

Lithium salts make batteries powerful but expensive. An ultralow-concentration electrolyte based on the lithium salt LiDFOB may be a more economical and more sustainable alternative. Cells using these electrolytes and conventional ...

Hi Tech & Innovation

Microsoft teases lifelike avatar AI tech but gives no release date

Researchers at Microsoft have revealed a new artificial tool that can create deeply realistic human avatars—but offered no timetable to make it available to the public, citing concerns about facilitating deep fake content.

Engineering

Greater access to clean water, thanks to a better membrane

Water scarcity around the world is a bigger problem than ever, and desalination is critical to solving it. The best available technologies for separating salt from seawater, though, are costly and require a great deal of ...