For environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, infrastructure maintenance and certain security applications, slow and energy efficient can be better than fast and always needing a recharge. That’s where “SlothBot” comes in. Powered by a pair of photovoltaic panels and designed to linger in the forest canopy continuously for months, SlothBot moves only when it must to…

To a non-physicist, an “atomic beam collimator” may sound like a phaser firing mystical particles. That might not be the worst metaphor to introduce a technology that researchers have now miniaturized, making it more likely to someday land in handheld devices. Today, atomic beam collimators are mostly found in physics labs, where they shoot out…

Capacitors, given their high energy output and recharging speed, could play a major role in powering the machines of the future, from electric cars to cell phones. But the biggest hurdle for these energy storage devices is that they store much less energy than a battery of similar size. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology…

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have devised a method for using an origami-based structure to create radio frequency filters that have adjustable dimensions, enabling the devices to change which signals they block throughout a large range of frequencies. The new approach to creating these tunable filters could have a variety of uses, from…

A glucose-powered biofuel cell that uses electrodes made from cotton fiber could someday help power implantable medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. The new fuel cell, which provides twice as much power as conventional biofuel cells, could be paired with batteries or supercapacitors to provide a hybrid power source for the medical devices. Researchers…

A couple of sugars, a dash of enzymes, a pinch of salt, a splash of polyethylene glycol, carefully arranged in watery baths. And researchers had made a synthetic organelle, which they used in a new study to explore some odd cellular biochemistry. The researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology made the chemical medley in…

A team of semiconductor researchers based in France has used a boron nitride separation layer to grow indium gallium nitride (InGaN) solar cells that were then lifted off their original sapphire substrate and placed onto a glass substrate. By combining the InGaN cells with photovoltaic (PV) cells made from materials such as silicon or gallium…

From electric cars that travel hundreds of miles on a single charge to chainsaws as mighty as gas-powered versions, new products hit the market each year that take advantage of recent advances in battery technology. But that growth has led to concerns that the world’s supply of lithium, the metal at the heart of many…

Curvy baseball pitches have surprising things in common with quantum particles described in a new physics study, though the latter fly much more weirdly. In fact, ultracold paired particles called fermions must behave even weirder than physicists previously thought, according to theoretical physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who mathematically studied their flight patterns.…

More than 1 million Americans require daily physical assistance to get dressed because of injury, disease and advanced age. Robots could potentially help, but cloth and the human body are complex. To help address this need, a robot at the Georgia Institute of Technology is successfully sliding hospital gowns on people’s arms. The machine doesn’t…

By treating living cells like tiny absorbent sponges, researchers have developed a potentially new way to introduce molecules and therapeutic genes into human cells. The technique first compresses cells in a microfluidic device by rapidly flowing them through a series of tiny “speed bumps” built into the micro-channels, which compresses out small amounts of fluid…

Powering clean, efficient cars is just one way fuel cell technology could accelerate humanity into a sustainable energy future, but unfortunately, the technology has been a bit sluggish. Now, engineers may be able to essentially turbocharge fuel cells with a new catalyst. The sluggishness comes from a chemical bottleneck, the rate of processing oxygen, a…

A nanostructured gate dielectric may have addressed the most significant obstacle to expanding the use of organic semiconductors for thin-film transistors. The structure, composed of a fluoropolymer layer followed by a nanolaminate made from two metal oxide materials, serves as gate dielectric and simultaneously protects the organic semiconductor – which had previously been vulnerable to…

A transfer technique based on thin sacrificial layers of boron nitride could allow high-performance gallium nitride gas sensors to be grown on sapphire substrates and then transferred to metallic or flexible polymer support materials. The technique could facilitate the production of low-cost wearable, mobile and disposable sensing devices for a wide range of environmental applications.…

A ceramic-based mechanical pump able to operate at record temperatures of more than 1,400 degrees Celsius (1,673 Kelvin) can transfer high temperature liquids such as molten tin, enabling a new generation of energy conversion and storage systems. The new pump could facilitate high efficiency, low-cost thermal storage, providing a new way to store renewable energy…

Using flexible conducting polymers and novel circuitry patterns printed on paper, researchers have demonstrated proof-of-concept wearable thermoelectric generators that can harvest energy from body heat to power simple biosensors for measuring heart rate, respiration or other factors. Because of their symmetrical fractal wiring patterns, the devices can be cut to the size needed to provide…

Using a simple layer-by-layer coating technique, researchers from the U.S. and Korea have developed a paper-based flexible supercapacitor that could be used to help power wearable devices. The device uses metallic nanoparticles to coat cellulose fibers in the paper, creating supercapacitor electrodes with high energy and power densities – and the best performance so far…

Anyone who has a rear-view mirror that automatically dims blue in reaction to annoying high-beam headlights glaring from behind has seen an electrochromic film in action. Now, chemists at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new method to more safely and, by extension, easily produce these shear films, which change their color with…

Heart valve models created with advanced 3-D printers could soon assist cardiologists in preparing to perform life-saving heart valve replacements. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Piedmont Heart Institute are using standard medical imaging and new 3-D printing technologies to create patient-specific heart valve models that mimic the physiological qualities of the real…