Jun 28, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Conventional food production, which relies heavily on industrial agriculture and animal husbandry, is putting huge strains on our environment both in terms of land use and sustainability. With a growing sustainability movement around the globe, the concept of urban farming has gained huge popularity for...
Food-packaging system reduces health risks and saves food
Jun 28, 2022 (Nanowerk News) As food costs continue to rise and a global food crisis looms on the horizon, it’s staggering to think that some 30-40% of America’s food supply ends up in landfills, mostly due to spoilage. At the same time, the World Health Organization estimates that foodborne...
A rethink of the building blocks for perovskite solar panels could help mass production
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) An original approach to mass-producing low-cost solar cell foundation blocks could lead to the wide adoption of solar panels made from perovskite ink, according to research from the University of Surrey. In the paper published in Scientific Reports ("A route towards the fabrication of large-scale...
Third and fourth robotic arms feel like a part of the user’s own body
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A research team with members from the University of Tokyo, Keio University and Toyohashi University of Technology have developed supernumerary robotic arms operated by the user’s foot movements in a virtual environment. It has shown that users can feel the supernumerary robotic arms as a...
2D materials for a major leap forward in non-volatile memory technologies
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Non-volatile memories –which are able to retain information even when power is removed— are largely employed in computers, tablets, pen drives and many other electronic devices. Among the various existing technologies, magnetoresistive random-access memories (MRAM), currently used only in specific applications, are expected to expand...
Tough new robots will aim to think and act for themselves in the most hazardous places on Earth
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A new generation of smart robots is being developed at The University of Manchester as part of an ambitious R&D programme to help the UK maintain its leadership in automatation technologies, These new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered machines will be designed to think and act for...
New approach reduces EV battery testing time by 75%
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Testing the longevity of new electric vehicle battery designs could be four times faster with a streamlined approach, researchers at the University of Michigan have shown (Patterns, "A generic battery cycling optimization framework with learned sampling and early stopping strategies"). Their optimization framework could drastically...
Making dark semiconductors shine
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) An international research team led by scientists at the University of Oldenburg has succeeded in manipulating the energy-level structure in an ultra-thin sample in such a way that this semiconductor, which normally has a low luminescence yield, began to emit light. Whether or not a...
Spray-painting sensors on any surface
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk Spotlight) Over the past few years, the development of materials that act as chemical paints (i.e. coatings) by responding to a (bio)chemical parameter with a change in their optical properties has developed into an exciting new field. In a typical application, the object of interest is...
Novel microfluidic chip can detect contaminants in 100-picoliter samples
Jun 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Scientists from the Institute of Laser Engineering at Osaka University created a prototype terahertz optical spectroscopy system with a sensing area equivalent to the cross-sectional area of just five human hairs. By measuring the shift in peak transmittance wavelength of a terahertz radiation source, the...