A group led by Australian of the Year, Professor Michelle Simmons, has overcome another critical technical hurdle for building a silicon-based quantum computer. Simmons’ team at UNSW Sydney has demonstrated a compact sensor for accessing information stored in the electrons of individual atoms — a breakthrough that brings us one step closer to scalable quantum…
New Invention Aims to Improve Battery Performance
Imagine a world where cell phones and laptops can be charged in a matter of minutes instead of hours, rolled up and stored in your pocket, or dropped without sustaining any damage. It is possible, according to University of Delaware Professor Thomas H. Epps, III, but the materials are not there yet. So, what is…
Nanofibers Manufactured for Wearable Power Sources
With the recently increasing development of lightweight, portable, flexible and wearable electronics for health and biomedical devices, there is an urgent need to explore new power sources with higher flexibility and human/tissue-adaptability. Now, researchers have engineered next-generation metal-air batteries, which can be easily fabricated into flexible and wristband-like cells. Though they require further development before…
NSF Grant Awarded for Smart-building Sensor Research
The National Science Foundation has awarded University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa researchers a $750,000 grant to develop a low-cost sensor capable of detecting human presence and monitoring occupants for energy-savings and smart-building applications. The Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II grant was awarded to UH Mānoa in partnership with technology company Adnoviv. Olga Borić-Lubecke,…
New Sensor Quickly Detects Chemical Warfare Agents
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a stamp-sized sensor that can detect trace amounts of certain chemical warfare agents, such as sarin, within minutes. The research is published in ACS Omega. Sarin is a man-made nerve agent that can spread as a gas or liquid. According to the Center for Disease…
Bendable Phone Offers Life-saving Technology
Is a new phone on your holiday shopping list? A “radical” technology being developed at Purdue University that’s making smartphones and other electronic devices more bendable could help save lives one day soon through better health monitoring. The Purdue team has designed a glass-like polymer to conduct electricity for transparent and flexible electronics. The innovative…
Elephant Trunks Inspire Versatile Chemical Sensors
Some animals have a superpower in their sense of smell. They explore, interpret, and understand their world with such sensitivity that people have enlisted canines to help solve crime and detect cancer on the breath. Scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are now homing in on the secrets behind animals’ super sniffers to develop…
Wearable Patch Delivers Drugs Directly to Eye
Current localized treatment methods such as eye drops and ointments are hindered by the eye’s natural defenses, blinking and tears. Eye injections can be painful and carry a risk of infection and eye damage. As a result, some patients are unable to keep up with the prescribed regime for their eye ailments, many of which…
Body Heat Powers Electronic Devices
If thermoelectric materials can convert low-grade heat into electricity, we may never need to charge wearable technology at home again. At night, most of us plug in a jumble of wires and devices as we charge our smart watches, phones and fitness trackers. It’s a pile that’s unlikely to get any smaller as more and…
‘Smart Skin’ Senses Strain in Structures
Thanks to one peculiar characteristic of carbon nanotubes, engineers will soon be able to measure the accumulated strain in an airplane, a bridge or a pipeline – or just about anything – over the entire surface or down to microscopic levels. They’ll do so by shining a light onto structures coated with a two-layer nanotube…
Food Safety Sensors for Consumers
MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a wireless system that leverages the cheap RFID tags already on hundreds of billions of products to sense potential food contamination — with no hardware modifications needed. With the simple, scalable system, the researchers hope to bring food-safety detection to the general public. Food safety incidents have made headlines…
Discovery Could Lead to Smaller, Cheaper IoT Sensors
Researchers from the Green IC research group at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have invented a low-cost ‘battery-less’ wake-up timer — in the form of an on-chip circuit — that significantly reduces power consumption of silicon chips for Internet of Things (IoT) sensor nodes. The novel wake-up timer by the NUS team demonstrates for…
Sensor Sniffs Out Armpit Odor
Body odor is a stubborn problem. Not just for people, but also for sensors. Sensors and the computing attached to them struggle to perceive armpit odors in the way humans do, because B.O. is really a complex mix of dozens of gaseous chemicals. The U.K.’s PlasticArmPit project is designing the first machine learning-enabled flexible plastic…
Wearable Bio-patch Offers Improved Cellular Observation, Drug Delivery
Purdue University researchers have developed a new flexible and translucent base for silicon nanoneedle patches to deliver exact doses of biomolecules directly into cells and expand observational opportunities. “This means that eight or nine silicon nanoneedles can be injected into a single cell without significantly damaging a cell. So we can use these nanoneedles to…
Nanocrystals Form Sandwich Structure to Become Quantum Light Source
Excited photo-emitters can cooperate and radiate simultaneously, a phenomenon called superfluorescence. Researchers from Empa and ETH Zurich, together with colleagues from IBM Research Zurich, have recently been able to create this effect with long-range ordered nanocrystal superlattices. This discovery could enable future developments in LED lighting, quantum sensing, quantum communication, and future quantum computing. The…
Artificial Sensor Simulates Human Touch
A team of researchers have developed an artificial tactile sensor that mimics the ability of human skin to detect surface information, such as shapes, patterns, and structures. This may be one step closer to making electronic devices and robots that can perceive sensations such as roughness and smoothness. “Mimicking the human senses is one of…
Sensor Monitors Health of Plants
A Purdue University professor has built an innovative handheld sensor that gives plant scientists and farmers a more precise way of measuring the health of crops while gathering up-to-the-minute data that state and federal officials and others will find valuable. Jian Jin, an assistant professor in Purdue’s Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, hopes his…
Nanoplatelets Create Better LCD and LED Screens
Researchers at the Physical and Analytical Chemistry department of the Universitat Jaume I (UJI) of Castellón, Spain, have taken part in the design of semiconductor nanoplatelets with a broadened range of colors to improve LCD and LED screens, thanks to an international collaboration headed by the University of Ghent. The results of this research, in…
New Technique Explores More Powerful Quantum Sensors
As quantum technology continues to come into its own, investment is happening on a global scale. Soon, we could see improvements in machine learning models, financial risk assessment, efficiency of chemical catalysts, and the discovery of new medications. As numerous scientists, companies and governments rush to invest in the new era of quantum technology, a…
Wearable Monitor is a Game-changer for Hydrocephalus Sufferers
Most people simply take ibuprofen when they get a headache. But for someone with hydrocephalus — a potentially life-threatening condition in which excess fluid builds up in the brain — a headache can indicate a serious problem that can result in a hospital visit, thousands of dollars in scans, radiation and sometimes surgery. A new…
Kevlar Modified with Nanofibers to Provide Comfortable, Flexible Heat
Sometimes nothing feels better on stiff, aching joints than a little heat. But many heating pads and wraps are rigid and provide uneven warmth, especially when the person is moving around. Researchers have now made a wearable heater by modifying woven Kevlar fabric with nanowires that conduct and retain heat. They report their results in…
Droplets on the Move Inside of Fibers
Microfluidics devices are tiny systems with microscopic channels that can be used for chemical or biomedical testing and research. In a potentially game-changing advance, MIT researchers have now incorporated microfluidics systems into individual fibers, making it possible to process much larger volumes of fluid, in more complex ways. In a sense, the advance opens up…
Sensor Monitors Muscles to Enhance Athletic Training
Elite athletes understand that to maximize performance, they can’t only train hard during workouts — they must also train smart. Unfortunately, unless you’re willing to live in a lab, it can be easier to get real-time information about your car than your body. Startup Humon is one of a growing number of companies trying to…
Layering Boron Nitride on Materials Improves Performance
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a route to alter boron nitride, a layered 2D material, so that it can bind to other materials, like those found in electronics, biosensors, and airplanes, for example. Being able to better-incorporate boron nitride into these components could help dramatically improve their performance. The scientific…
Epilepsy Warning Sensor Aims to Save Lives
A new high-tech bracelet, developed by scientists from the Netherlands, detects 85 percent of all severe nighttime epilepsy seizures. That is a much better score than any other technology currently available. The researchers involved think that this bracelet can reduce the worldwide number of unexpected nighttime fatalities in epilepsy patients. They published the results of…