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To reliably complete various manual tasks, robots should be able to handle a variety of objects, ranging from items found in households to tools used in specific professional settings. While many existing robotic systems ...

Scientists are advancing a promising solution to two of the world's biggest challenges—plastic pollution and clean energy—by transforming waste plastics into valuable fuels using sunlight.

A thermoelectric generator with a shape that no human designer would likely have imagined has now been created by a computer—and it performs more than eight times better than conventional designs. Rather than relying on intuition ...

Imagine a display that harvests ambient light when it is not actively in use, offsetting some of its own energy consumption. Materials physics shows that this is possible; the same semiconductor material can, in principle, ...

Workplace hearing loss is one of the most common work-related illnesses. While hearing loss is preventable with earplugs, they can be uncomfortable, and users often remove them despite the risks. Low-frequency sounds, such ...

Perovskite solar cells are a rapidly advancing photovoltaic technology that has seen a dramatic rise in power conversion efficiency in recent years. A key driver of this progress is the use of molecular charge-selective contacts—ultrathin ...

Robotically assembled building blocks could be a more environmentally friendly method for erecting large-scale structures than some existing construction techniques, according to a new study by MIT researchers published in ...

In a new analysis, two UCL researchers argue that the present system used to allocate billions in research funding was designed for a world without AI agents and may no longer be fit for that purpose.

It does not take much to confuse some robots. A machine might be great at handling a simple object like a box, yet when it tries to work with a more irregular shape like a banana, it often fails.

As devices for wireless sensing systems become smaller and more complex, finding suitable power sources for them is becoming increasingly difficult. However, advances in low-power sensing technology may allow such systems ...

Digital image sensors (DIS), devices that capture images by converting light patterns into electrical signals, are integrated in many contemporary electronic devices, including smartphones, digital cameras and some medical ...

As global demand for lithium-ion batteries continues to surge, a team of Rice University researchers has developed a faster, more energy-efficient way to recover critical minerals from spent batteries, potentially easing ...