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The race is on not just to find coronavirus treatments and a vaccine, but also to develop wearable sensors that can comfortably and accurately monitor a variety of life-threatening conditions. Recently, a team of researchers led by…

Unlike human joints, some of which are just badly designed, soft robotic actuators’ moving parts are fairly easily fixed. Repeated activity wears on them too. Recently a team of researchers has a created biosynthetic polymer, patterned…

Despite manufacturing halts, a drop in demand, and an uncertain recovery timeline due to the coronavirus pandemic, the global automotive power electronics market size is projected to grow from US$3.8 billion in 2020 to US$4.7 billion by…

Analysis of various bodily fluids reveals a lot about our overall health. Now it seems it’s sweat turn to shine, with Tufts University engineers’ creation of a flexible electronic sensing patch that can be sewn into clothing to analyze your…

In his 1969 novel The Age of the Pussyfoot,  American sci-fi author Frederck Pohl wrote about a world where everyone could access knowledge and communicate with others through a small handheld device similar to a smartphone.  Science…

One of the biggest challenges of quantum physics is that work to develop quantum computers has to be done at very very low temperatures.  Now, an international team led by researchers at Princeton University has uncovered a new class of…

While CGI is known to consumers primarily as a tool for movie-making and computer gaming, its applications extend to the creation and presentation of meteorological data, medical imaging, architecture and technology. The ability to rotate,…

In its general entry on robots, Wikipedia wryly points out that much of the confidence that household robots would clean our houses for us was “overly optimistic in timescale.” While there are the one-trick Roombas of the appliance…

As renewable energy to power our homes and cars slowly gains traction, the energy storage market was projected to be worth $2.8 billion by 2021. Lithium-ion batteries are recognized for their high energy density in everything from mobile…

Biodiesels, the versatile product of vegetable oil, can be used to power our cars and heat our homes, as well as to clean up oil spills and remove paint. Biodiesel production has been around for more than 150 years, and the approach…

The connection between lightning and hurricanes has yet to be proven, but there is at least one researcher exploring a causal relationship between East African lightning and Atlantic hurricanes. With Atlantic hurricane season starting…

The shortage of N95 masks for healthcare workers beginning to battle the coronavirus was exacerbated by the long turnaround time to manufacture and, often import, a vital piece of PPE — between 65 and 80 days. But due to the materials…

Black holes, the regions in spacetime where gravity is so strong nothing can escape, have fascinated astronomers since the 18th Century, when they were first proposed.  Recently, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have watched for the…

As we reach peak Moore’s Law, the number of transistors per chip and the number of chips per electronic device has grown exponentially, which means making them smaller. For a long time, something important has been neglected in electronics:…

In many ways, robot development mimics child development. Children aren’t born with the fine motor skills to write cursive; these develop over time. There are similar challenges with robots, who can easily outlift humans in terms of weight…