Tech Xplore news
Tech Xplore / Platinum in fuel cells lasts longer with nitrogen-enhanced graphene wrapper
Researchers from Nagoya University in Japan have developed a durable fuel-cell catalyst by wrapping platinum nanoparticles in nitrogen-containing graphene and placing them on carbon nanotubes. This design retained 96.9% of ...
Tech Xplore / Heat-storing gel could cut buildings' energy consumption
Heating and cooling buildings account for a large portion of global energy use. A research team in the Texas A&M University Department of Materials Science and Engineering was featured on the cover of ACS Applied Materials ...
Tech Xplore / Autonomous vehicles can still see lanes through tampered sensors—but in the wrong place
Driver-assistance systems are now installed in nearly all modern cars. As a result, safety depends on whether computer systems can reliably process sensor data. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) are ...
Tech Xplore / Overlooked indium selenide phase enables wafer-scale logic transistors
Just as carbon atoms arranged in different ways can form either graphite or diamond—the hardest natural material—semiconductor materials can also exhibit completely different properties depending on their atomic arrangements. ...
Tech Xplore / Simple modification improves commercial resin for direct air capture
To mitigate climate change, direct air capture of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere has emerged as an increasingly attractive option for limiting global warming. But scaling up systems to remove and safely store enough ...
Tech Xplore / New wireless system could power medical implants as they stretch
Over the past few decades, electronics engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated implantable medical devices. Reliably powering some of these devices, however, can be challenging, particularly when they are based ...
Tech Xplore / Threadlike motor uses sliding fibers to drive flexible robotic devices without gears
In 2023, researchers in the Soft Transducers Laboratory in EPFL's School of Engineering presented the world's first pump in the form of a fiber. The pump's flexible tubing can generate its own fluid pressure and flow rate ...
Tech Xplore / Feather star-inspired underwater robot gets 3D maneuverability from only two actuators
Researchers have created an aquatic soft robot inspired by marine invertebrates called feather stars. The feather star robot is able to move through the water in all three dimensions, powered by only two actuators. The paper, ...
Tech Xplore / Spiking neural network learns to predict what will happen, when, and how likely it is
Imagine hearing a familiar sound and expecting something to happen. Before the event arrives, the brain can predict what it will be, when it will occur and how likely it is. Yet computational models often treat these questions ...
Tech Xplore / New method reveals how efficiently water-based cells turn waste heat into electricity
Most electricity is generated by using heat to produce steam, which then turns a turbine. Although this approach performs exceptionally well in the high-temperature, superheated-steam regime, we currently lack widely applicable ...
Tech Xplore / New AI method uses engineering knowledge to estimate disaster damage from incomplete satellite imagery
A new technology has been developed that can rapidly predict city-scale structural damage even when portions of satellite imagery are obscured by clouds or smoke immediately after a disaster.
Tech Xplore / 'SANDO' system ensures a robot's flight path will remain collision-free in uncharted territory
Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly deep into the heart of a raging wildfire, avoiding sudden flare-ups and dodging falling tree branches to gather critical information for rescuers. But in this dangerous situation, ...
