A discovery by University of Cincinnati researchers could revolutionize display technology with e-paper that’s fast enough for video yet cheap enough to be disposable. In their research, Andrew Steckl and UC doctoral student Duk Young Kim demonstrated that paper could be used as a flexible host material for an electrowetting (EW) device. EW involves applying… »

Although we tend not to write about prefabricated homes, here is an article about a house that was recently exhibited in Millennium Park, Chicago. Inspired by the glass pavilion-style Farnsworth House designed by Bauhaus architect Mies Van Der Rohe, the folks from Virginia Tech came up with LUMENHAUS – a prefabricated house which features a… »

With the increased use of underwater robotics, underwater navigation becomes more and more important. A research team from Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Washington, and Naval Surface Warfare Center has developed and tested an underwater navigation system that uses a spiral shaped acoustic wave to determine aspect. The single stationary beacon can provide a… »

Imagine a computer equipped with shock-proof memory that’s 100,000 times faster and consumes less power than current hard disks. Professor Mathias Kläui from EPFL and PSI is working on a new kind of “Racetrack” memory, a high-volume, ultra-rapid non-volatile read-write magnetic memory that was invented at IBM and may soon make mentioned features possible. Although… »

A bacteria that can knit together cracks in concrete structures by producing a special ‘glue’ has been developed by a team of students at Newcastle University. The genetically-modified microbe has been programmed to swim down fine cracks in the concrete. Once at the bottom, BacillaFilla produces a mixture of calcium carbonate and a bacterial glue… »

In a first step toward achieving industrial-scale green production, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborators at Dow AgroSciences reported engineering a plant that produces industrially relevant levels of compounds that could potentially be used to make plastics. The research is reported online in Plant Physiology, and will appear… »

Most of the today’s popular music artists use technology to add effects or adjust their singing in order to make it more interesting to new generations of listeners. A program called Vocaloid can synthesize singing of male or female voices which have been used for choruses and it has been around since 2004. One of… »

Thanks to a partnership between Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Houston’s Rice University and an Indian nonprofit, Villages for Development and Learning Foundation (ViDAL), some of the estimated 100 million Indian children who attend schools without electricity may soon have access to one of the world’s most advanced electronic notepads. Dubbed I-slate, the device is… »