Tech
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Tech
Cleanup Speedup: Device improves oil-spill recovery
By adding grooves to the surface of a common oil-skimming device, researchers recovered up to three times as much oil as they do with smooth-surfaced devices.
- Tech
Unstoppable Bot: Armed with self-scrutiny, a mangled robot moves on
Roboticists have made a walking machine that carries on despite serious damage.
- Tech
The Little Chill: Tiny wind generator to cool microchip hot spots
By generating a tiny cooling wind, a microscale silicon needle armed with a powerful electric field has demonstrated its potential as a new way to cool increasingly hot microchips.
- Tech
Teasing Apart Nanotubes: Fast-spun carbon fibers may feed an industry
Researchers have devised a way to sort carbon nanotubes by size and electronic properties.
- Tech
Muscling up colors for electronic displays
Researchers have found a way to provide the complete color palette for television and computer screens.
- Tech
Long-Sought Laser? Standard microchips may gain speedy optical connections
Although not made exclusively of silicon, a new type of laser runs on electricity and could be mass manufactured in the same factories as silicon microchips are.
- Tech
Start your engines
Mechanical engineers have developed a system that greatly decreases the amount of toxic hydrocarbons a car releases.
- Tech
A thin laser gets thinner
Researchers have created a microchip laser that fires an extraordinarily thin beam of high-intensity light.
- Tech
Cyber attack depletes cell phone batteries
In a new type of cyber attack, assailants using computers connected to the Internet can secretly induce distant cell phones to rapidly deplete their batteries.
- Tech
Size Matters: Biosensors behave oddly when very small
There might be a limit to how small physicists should build tiny sensors that detect viruses and molecules.
- Tech
Wheel of Life: Bacteria provide horsepower for tiny motor
Crawling bacteria can power a micromotor.
- Tech
The ups and downs of routing fluids on chips
A new way to build microscale pipes in three dimensions boosts the sophistication of chips that manipulate fluids to perform chemical reactions and other tasks.
