How many times you wished that your headphones had extra length or you ended up with tangled elastic electrical cord? North Carolina State University researchers are close to a great solution to these problems, since they managed to create conductive wires that won’t tangle and can function after being stretched up to eight times of… »

A group of researchers from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a new microscale actuator which could find its application in novel microfluidics, drug delivery, and artificial muscles. The actuators are smaller than the width of a human hair and are based on an oxide material… »

The amount of data being created and transmitted over enterprise networks continues to grow due to an explosion of new applications and services. IBM recently revealed a major breakthrough in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit information for future computing. Called silicon nanophotonics, the technology allows the integration of different… »

Many research groups around the world have been inspired by swarms and they have been striving to develop suitable platforms and different algorithms. A group of researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a basic robotic building block called droplet, and they hope they’ll be able to reproduce it in large quantities to… »

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by researchers from MIT and Harvard University, has been inspired by mussels and their ability to cling to rocks, piers and boat hulls, to develop a bioadhesive gel that may find its use in various medical applications. Current version of the gel enables it to be painted onto the… »

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and a team of chemists at University of Southern California (USC) managed to utilize an ozone-destroying greenhouse gas which previously had little practical use. They managed to transform fluoroform – a common byproduct in Teflon manufacture – into reagents that could be used in structurally elaborate pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals,… »

More than 3,500 years ago, civilizations in Asia and the Middle East used boiled rose madder roots to color fabrics in vivid colors such as orange, red and pink. Rose madder roots owe this ability to an organic compound in them named purpurin. Aside being a natural plant dye, purpurin could be used to power… »

North American porcupine upper parts are covered with thousands of sharp, barbed hollow spines (quills), which are used for defense. The ability of these quills to easily penetrate tissues are often hard to remove once lodged in flesh intrigued an international group of researchers, and their investigation might inspire development of medical needles that easily… »