Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and University of California, Los Angeles, have discovered a new chemical reaction that has the potential to lower the cost and streamline the manufacture of compounds ranging from agricultural chemicals to pharmaceutical drugs. The reaction resolves a long-standing challenge in organic chemistry in creating phenolic compounds from… »
Researchers at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory (BRL), a collaborative research partnership of the University of the West of England and the University of Bristol, have developed a novel way to charge mobile phones by using urine as the power source which generates electricity. The system generates enough power to enable SMS messaging, web browsing and… »
We already wrote about various new ways for information interaction, and a group of researchers at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) developed a low cost system which allows conversion of virtually any flat solid surface around us into a touch sensitive surface. The system relies on the principles of vibration and imaging, and it is… »
Collaboration between Swedish engineer Andreas Hammar with researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and the water purification company HVR resulted in development of the first machine that extracts people’s sweat from clothes, purifies it and transforms it into potable water. It uses a water purification technology called membrane distillation. The inspiration for… »
Experiments at Rice University meant to reveal how graphene grows under high pressure and in a hydrogen-rich environment resulted up with development of concentric hexagons of graphene. The process represents the first time anyone has synthesized graphene nanoribbons atom by atom on metal. Once perfected, the approach could lead to breakthroughs in electronics lithium ion… »
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… »
