Advance shows promise for “meta-bots” designed to deliver drugs or aid rescue missions. A team of UCLA engineers and their colleagues have developed a new design strategy and 3D printing technique to build robots in one single step. A study that outlined the advance, along with the construction and demonstration of an assortment of tiny robots that walk, maneuver and jump, was published in Science. The breakthrough enabled the entire mechanical and electronic systems needed to operate a robot to…

… that has 100 times more light durability than conventional products. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists synthesize new photostable organic semiconductor. Due to their high hole mobility, pentacene and its derivatives have been the representative organic semiconductors and have been the subject of much research, both basic and applied. In particular, they are expected to be applied to semiconductor devices such as field-effect transistors. In addition, organic semiconductors have the advantage of being inexpensive to produce by inkjet printing and having…

Material scientists at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany have developed a mechanoluminescent material that can not only be used to generate a local heat input by means of ultrasound, but also provides feedback on the local temperature at the same time. If mechanoluminescent materials are subjected to external mechanical stress, they emit visible or invisible light. Such excitation can occur due to bending or gentle pressure, for example, but also completely contact-free through ultrasound. In this way, the effect can…

– a promising discovery. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces (MPICI) and McGill University in Canada discovered strong adhesive properties of white-berry mistletoe. The mistletoe berry’s flexible fibers adhere to both skin and cartilage as well as to various synthetic materials and could find application in many fields, such as wound sealant in biomedicine, through ease of processing. For their research, the materials scientists led by Prof. Dr. Peter Fratzl picked the mistletoe…

UBCO researchers change the game when it comes to activity tracking. The creation of high-resolution extrusion printing—think 3D printing but with ink that conducts electricity—has enabled UBC researchers to explore the potential of wearable human motion devices. Wearable technology—smartwatches, heart monitors, sleep aid devices, even step counters—have become part of everyday life. And researchers with UBC Okanagan’s Nanomaterials and Polymer Nanocomposites Laboratory, have created even smaller, lighter and highly-accurate sensors that can be integrated into clothing and equipment. In collaboration with…

Watch this. Watch for the patterns created as the circles move across each other. Those patterns, created by two sets of lines offset from each other, are called moiré (pronounced mwar-AY) effects. As optical illusions, moiré patterns create neat simulations of movement. But at the atomic scale, when one sheet of atoms arranged in a lattice is slightly offset from another sheet, these moiré patterns can create some exciting and important physics with interesting and unusual electronic properties. Mathematicians at…

Scientists from the Institute of Industrial Science at The University of Tokyo fabricated three-dimensional vertically formed field-effect transistors to produce high-density data storage devices by ferroelectric gate insulator and atomic-layer-deposited oxide semiconductor channel. Furthermore, by using antiferroelectric instead of ferroelectric, they found that only a tiny net charge was required to erase data, which leads to more efficient write operations. This work may allow for new even smaller and more eco-friendly data-storage memory. While consumer flash drives already boast huge…

The Fraunhofer IPMS-developed EMSA5-FS processor core for functional safety based on the open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture is supported by another important debug tool. With the integration into the toolsets of the leading manufacturer of microprocessor development tools Lauterbach, nu-merous debug functions are now available for the 32-bit RISC-V core. The EMSA5-FS is the first fault-tolerant embedded RISC-V processor core according to functional safety and was awarded the Product of the Year 2022 in the automotive sector by the trade…

Invented by UChicago scientists, a new kind of solar cell could spur useful technology. Holes help make sponges and English muffins useful (and, in the case of the latter, delicious). Without holes, they wouldn’t be flexible enough to bend into small crevices, or to sop up the perfect amount of jam and butter. In a new study, University of Chicago scientists find that holes can also improve technology, including medical devices. Published in Nature Materials, the paper describes an entirely…

… than existing plastic-based materials. One day soon, buildings could become more energy-efficient—and environmentally sustainable—with insulating material developed from wood by researchers in Sweden. The newly-developed material offers as good or even better thermal performance than ordinary plastic-based insulation materials, according to researchers reporting recently in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.Yuanyuan Li, an assistant professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Center, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says that the new insulating material is an aerogel integrated wood which is…

… improves prediction accuracy of battery capacity. Recently, electric vehicles (EVs) are seen everywhere, from passenger cars, buses, to taxis. EVs have the advantage of being eco-friendly and having low maintenance costs; but their owners must remain wary of fatal accidents in case the battery runs out or reaches the end of its life. Therefore, precise capacity and lifespan predictions for the lithium-ion batteries – commonly used in EVs – are vital. A POSTECH research team led by Professor Seungchul…

… with a non-noble metal cocatalyst Mo2C under visible light. Nanomaterials frontier towards hydrogen energy. Halide perovskites have been emerging as promising photocatalytic materials for H2-evolution from water due to their outstanding photoelectric properties. However, the lack of proper surface reactive sites greatly hinders the photocatalytic potential of these fascinating compounds. Here, Mo2C nanoparticles have been anchored onto methylammonium lead iodide (MAPbI3) as a non-noble-metal cocatalyst to promote H2-evolution reactions. They published their work on May. 28 in Energy Material Advances….

Toward ceramics tailored for optimized bone self-repair. Your chance of breaking a bone sometime within the next year is nearly 4%. If you’re unlucky enough to need a bone replacement, it’ll probably be based on a metal part. Unfortunately, metal parts are sometimes toxic over time, and will not help your original bone regrow. Calcium phosphate ceramics—substitutes for the bone mineral hydroxyapatite—are in principle an ideal alternative to conventional metals because bone can eventually replace the ceramic and regrow. However,…

Mimicking the human body, specifically the actuators that control muscle movement, is of immense interest around the globe. In recent years, it has led to many innovations to improve robotics, prosthetic limbs and more, but creating these actuators typically involves complex processes, with expensive and hard-to-find materials. Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Penn State University have created a new type of fiber that can perform like a muscle actuator, in many ways better than other options…

The European Union wants the Life Cycle Assessment of buildings to be given more significance in the future, and the EU Taxonomy creates a systematic basis for this: It defines criteria for evaluating investments, including for the climate change mitigation objective of the taxonomy. Researchers from the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics IBP worked together with a business partner to develop a software suite that combines ecological indicators and economic calculations for investments. This has an influence on banks’ lending…

Artificial muscles deliver sustainable cooling. A new type of energy efficient, ecologically sustainable cooling technology that does not require the use of climate-damaging refrigerants is currently being developed by Professor Stefan Seelecke and his team at Saarland University. The new technology makes use of shape-memory materials that are also known as ‘artificial muscles’. These materials are able to transport heat by loading and unloading nickel-titanium wires. Seelecke’s team is currently developing the technology for use in cooling systems for electric…