Building blocks from our childhood and our imagination enabled us to create new worlds and explore different ways to use what we had at our disposal. A year ago, Modular Robotics came up with Cubelets – simple robotic cubes which serve as building blocks that behave differently depending on how you connect them, like a… »

A group of Arizona State University (ASU) engineering students recently got a boost for Infinibotics – a business startup focused on development of an edutainment toy able to engage with children. They developed Cosmo – a robotic toy car which serves as play buddy and a tool for teaching pre-school-age children basic math and spelling… »

Polymer brushes are polymers in which individual polymer chains stand side by side on a surface, causing the chains to stick out like bristles on a brush. A team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and The Dow Chemical Company (Midland, Michigan) have developed a new method that allows creation these three-dimensional… »

Researchers at the North Carolina State University (NC State) have developed a 3D printing technology method which allows them to create free-standing structures made of liquid metal microstructures at room temperature. The researchers developed multiple techniques to create these free-standing microstructures which could be used in electronics, microfluidic networks, tissue engineering scaffolds, photonic band gap… »

Using nanostructured glass, researchers at the University of Southampton have experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. Dubbed as the ‘Superman’ memory crystal’, since the glass memory has been compared to the “memory crystals” used in the Superman movies, a disc can store 360 TB of… »

Researchers at the University of Bristol developed computer vision algorithms that enable creation of real-time 3D visual maps which enable Samsung‘s humanoid robot named Roboray to move around more efficiently. Rapid 3D visual mapping is essential for faster operation of humanoid robots because it provides them with ability to robustly track and recover from rapid… »

When you hear someone talking about solar panels, you imagine the black or bluish-gray colored panels. However, various groups of researchers are contributing to changes which help designers and architects in their goal for aesthetics. With the help of thin-film technologies, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute managed to contribute to this cause by turning solar… »

Octopods, such as octopuses and squids, are considered to be the most intelligent invertebrates. Their ability to flee fast when in danger by swimming head first inspired researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute to develop a silent propulsion system for boats and water sport devices. The system can be produced at a low cost and in… »