Tech
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Tech
Fluid lens flows into focus
By controlling a boundary between oil and water, researchers have created a liquid lens that can quickly alter its shape in response to electric signals.
- Tech
Soaring at Hyperspeed: Long-sought technology finally propels a plane
For the first time, an airplane flew at hypersonic speed under power of a scramjet, an engine that operates at high velocities using oxygen from the atmosphere.
- Tech
Miniaturized 3-D Printing: New polymer ink writes tiny structures
A new 3-D printer can build up complex polymer microstructures with features small enough for creating photonic crystals or scaffolds for tissue engineering.
- Tech
Golden waves make stretchy microcircuits
Microscale wires with stretchy, wiggly shapes may prove useful for sensors and other electronic gadgets embedded in pliable or elastic items such as clothing or living tissue.
- Tech
Iron Power: Eking more juice from batteries
By creating an extremely thin layer of an unusually electron-hungry form of iron, chemists have made a prototype rechargeable battery electrode that may lead to improved metal hydride batteries.
- Tech
Special Treatment: Fuel cell draws energy from waste
Researchers have created a fuel cell that breaks down organic matter in wastewater and, in the process, generates small amounts of electricity.
- Tech
Silicon goes optical
The advent of a fast, light-manipulating microdevice made from silicon suggests that speedy optical-fiber links now too expensive for broad use in businesses and homes may soon become widespread.
- Tech
Body Builders
By growing stem cells on three- dimensional polymer scaffolds, tissue engineers hope to mimic natural tissue development and ultimately produce replacement body parts.
- Computing
Straining for Speed
Hitting fundamental limits on how small they can make certain structures within semiconductor transistors, chip makers are deforming the silicon crystals from which those transistors are made to eke out some extra speed.
- Tech
The rat in the hat
A compact positron-emission tomography (PET) brain scanner may make possible studies of awake rats that link brain functions and behaviors.
- Computing
Paint by Pixel
Aaron Hertzmann is both a computer scientist and a painter. Among his art-related programming projects, he has developed a way for computers to refashion images and animations to reflect different painting styles. Other work includes a stretched “canvas” that projects a continually-changing painting of the viewer and a learning-by-example system that animates characters based on […]
- Tech
Snappy DNA: Long strand folds into octahedron
By harnessing the self-assembling properties of DNA, researchers coerced a single strand of the genetic material to assume the shape of an octahedron.
