Researchers at UCLA have created a twist on traditional LCDs that would allow displays to reclaim wasted photons from the backlight, or even act as a normal solar cell. Normal LCDs rely on an always-on backlight, but because of the way LCDs work, most of that light never escapes. This inherent inefficiency hasn’t stopped us from getting bright displays, but the power necessary to make them so is usually what runs down your battery.
But what if we could recycle that wasted light? Enter UCLA materials science professor Yang Yang and his team of engineers. → Read More
Researchers at Stanford University have put together an interesting new battery technology that combines two theoretically coveted attributes: transparency and flexibility. The method of making the battery transparent is rather clever, and while the resulting product is far less energy-dense than its opaque relatives, it’s still an interesting development.
The secret is organizing the components in a certain way on a microscopic scale. The electrode material isn’t see-through, but there’s no reason it has to be a solid block instead of something less substantial. Materials Science professor Yi Cui figured out a way to organize the active materials in a way that’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. → Read More
HumansInvent has an interesting piece on a laboratory at Oxford University that can “grow” electronics using a process called Molecular Beam Epitaxy. The system, which uses devices straight out of Dr. Bizarro’s Lab, creates a thin substrate of molecules and then builds it up over time, creating circuit boards, solar panels, and the like with lasers. → Read More
Research at Columbia Engineering School has yielded a material that is literally unlike any other known. Everything in the universe (that we can see) affects light one way or another. Slows it down, speeds it up, spreads it out, diffuses it in a certain way, whatever. Even man-made materials with “negative refractive indexes,” themselves unlike anything else in the universe, do something to the light. Not this stuff. → Read More
And I thought this salt-grain-sized camera was small. Cornell researchers have created an even tinier imaging device that does away with the last holdout features of traditional digital cameras. → Read More
The ongoing search for cartoon-style laser guns is likely to continue for a while, given the rather poor showing by even large, ship-mounted lasers. But that shouldn’t stop researchers from looking into it and making handheld lasers, even if they’re super weak. You have to start somewhere, right? Early guns were just tiny cannons, and inaccurate past 50 feet. You were better off with bows and arrows. Same story here. → Read More
Although the world is currently enamored of flash memory, today’s standard for solid-state storage, companies like IBM need to think a few years ahead. One of the technologies they’re looking at is called phase-change memory, in which a memory cell changes from a crystalline to amorphous phase, changing its resistance. Put a bunch of those together, and you’ve got yourself a binary storage system. → Read More
The winners of the the yearly MEMS (Microelectromechanical system) design competition held by Sandia National Labs were announced a short time ago, and they’re pretty impressive. Students from CMU and Texas Tech were honored and their designs highlighted: the Texas Tech team built a set of millimeter-wide dragonfly wings, and CMU made an electrostatically-activated microvalve. These things are quite small. → Read More
In the post-apocalyptic hellscape that will be next week, we’re going to need people who know how to make unique electronics projects in order to power the homes of the cannibals who will populate our cities. To that end, we present this interesting DIY Electrostatic motor that will power, for example, a fan used to blow flies away from the new God-King who will rise to take his place on the throne once all political systems have fallen. The device uses a set of sticks topped with round clackers. A high voltage charge shoots into them, shuttling back and forth as the power flows. → Read More
Body augmentation and limb replacement are just hugely interesting fields right now. We’ve got bionic legs, bionic eyes, even bionic cats. Bionic hands have been a troublesome topic for research because of the inadequacy of current technology in replicating fine motor control. This arm, being wielded by a young Austrian fellow who lost the use of his hand in an accident, isn’t quite perfect, but it sure is impressive as hell. → Read More
I remember poring over Uncle Milton Catalogs as a wee lad but I doubt old Milt has rubber glass, oil-absorbing polymers, or conductive foam sensors in his bag of tricks. That’s where Inventibles comes in. These guys are a one-stop shop for wild materials and scientific tools and I’m kind of salivating just going through the lists of items. → Read More
One of my fondest childhood memories was of visiting the Tid-Bit in Martins Ferry, Ohio and buying out their old collection of chemistry set chemicals for 60 cents each. I bought the fun stuff like sulfur, copper, iron filings, and potassium nitrate (charcoal I could make at home) and some off the odd stuff like Cobalt Chloride that I just loved to look at for the color. I learned very little from my “experiments” except how to make bright flames (my dad never let me pack the things I made so I couldn’t blow anything up) but I did learn a healthy respect for chemistry and chemicals. My dad understood that chemistry sets were, on the aggregate, harmless but in this ever-litigious world in which we live, that understanding is quickly being supplanted by the belief that kids are demons waiting for a chance to blow up a truck and head off to Gitmo. To wit: this chemistry set without chemicals. → Read More
Minor scratches to things like flooring, gadgets, and cars may soon be a thing of the past, if… wait, no, that lede is a little too PopSci. Let’s try again.
Researchers have come up with a new material that acts like a normal polymer coating under most circumstances, but when exposed to UV light, spontaneously heals nicks and scratches. Here comes the science! → Read More
Solar panels usually work through absorption. Light creates heat and, in turn, that heat is converted to energy. But physicists have long known that light has a magnetic element that, for years, has been ignored for being too weak to measure.
Students at the University of Michigan, however, have found that light’s magnetism can be captured and used without absorption, creating an intense charge. Unfortunately, you need a massive light source to actually see this effect – over 10 million wats per square centimeter – but you could feasibly push out this much energy using various light control systems. → Read More
Here’s an interesting little project that anybody with some foil, gaffing tape, and a scintillator can do. It’ll let you see for yourself the natural radiation associated with elements like 40K Potassium, and of course any radiation coming off things like reactors or Godzillas. → Read More
Back in 2008, the world consumed 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information. If all that digital information were to be printed and stacked up one-by-one, it would easily stretch from Earth to Neptune and back about 20 times. → Read More
The world is hooked on plastics, but creating plastics — especially thermoplastics like nylon, polyethylene, and polystyrene — typically requires petroleum or natural gas. That’s bad, because it deepens the world’s dependence on those finite resources. Researchers at the Institute of Agriculture & Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln have presented new research at a meeting of the American Chemical Society that purports to have found a way to create durable thermoplastics from chicken feathers. → Read More
One of the things green energy proponents eagerly look forward to is an “artificial leaf”: a truly small, portable, modular photosynthetic power plant. The ability to take a hundred or a thousand such units and plaster them on a wall, roof, tree, or whatever, and have them store power in a simple fuel cell all day long would be a great way to make power distribution less tricky in countries where there aren’t exactly power lines running everywhere.
MIT’s Daniel Nocera has apparently made a major advance just recently, producing an artificial leaf that not only uses cheap materials, but is ten times as efficient as a real leaf at the photosynthesis process. → Read More
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