Credit: Neuroncollective.com (Daniel Spacek, Pavel Jirak) / Chalmers University. This unusual material could improve the reliability of electronics and other devices. Moving heat around where you want it to go—adding it to houses and hairdryers, removing it from car engines and refrigerators—is one of the great challenges of engineering. All

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Credit: Jun Chen/UCLA A team of bioengineers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has invented a novel soft and flexible self-powered bioelectronic device. The technology converts human body motions—from bending an elbow to subtle movements such as a pulse on one’s wrist—into electricity that could be used to power

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Shiny nacre of Abalone washed ashore. Credit: Pi-Lens Scientists from McGill University develop stronger and tougher glass, inspired by the inner layer of mollusk shells. Instead of shattering upon impact, the new material has the resiliency of plastic and could be used to improve cell phone screens in the future,

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Credit: Public Domain CC0. Engineers at MIT have developed a new approach to removing lead or other heavy-metal contaminants from water, in a process that they say is far more energy-efficient than any other currently used system, though there are others under development that come close. Ultimately, it might be

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Credit: David Mark/Pixabay. Aerospace engineers at the University of Cincinnati have come up with a new nozzle design for F-18 fighter planes to dampen the deafening roar of the engines without hindering performance. Distinguished professor Ephraim Gutmark, an Ohio Eminent Scholar, and his students in UC’s College of Engineering and

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Credit: Aalto University When two substances are brought together, they will eventually settle into a steady state called the thermodynamic equilibrium. In everyday life, we see examples of this when oil floats on top of water and when milk mixes uniformly into coffee. Researchers at Aalto University in Finland wanted

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Credit: BRRT/Pixabay. Researchers have discovered a class of ceramics called MAX phases that can self-heal cracks even at room temperature. They’ve shown that these engineered ceramics form natural faults or kink-bands during loading that can not only effectively stop cracks from growing, but can also close and heal them, thereby

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Scientists create tiny mechanical capsules that can pick up, carry, and release cargo on cue. Credit: Sacanna et al. The need to carry things around is as old as humanity itself—we may have evolved to walk upright in part to carry tools—but transporting microscopic cargo has proved more challenging for

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Credit: ACS Central Science 2021. When stretched or deformed, shape memory polymers return to their original shapes after heat or light is applied. These materials show great promise for soft robotics, smart biomedical devices and deployable space structures, but until now they haven’t been able to store enough energy. Now,

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Credit: Jacob Bentzinger/Unsplash. Researchers have found a way to make a muscle protein and spin it into incredibly strong fibers. Their synthetic chemistry approach allowed them to polymerize proteins inside of engineered microbes, which then produced the high molecular weight muscle protein, titin. In the future, such material could be

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