Engineers discover new process for synthetic material growth, enabling soft robots that grow like plants (w/video)

Sep 28, 2022 (Nanowerk News) An interdisciplinary team of University of Minnesota Twin Cities scientists and engineers has developed a first-of-its-kind, plant-inspired extrusion process that enables synthetic material growth. The new approach will allow researchers to build better soft robots that can navigate hard-to-reach places, complicated terrain, and potentially areas...

Biosensor detects brain tumors with less than a drop of blood

Sep 28, 2022 (Nanowerk News) Despite significant advances, mortality from brain tumors remains high with five-year survival rates of 36%, according to the National Cancer Institute. More accurate diagnoses might improve the situation, but tissue biopsies are invasive and can miss important information about a tumor’s make-up. Imaging-based methods, meanwhile,...

Optical logic gates in future computers

Sep 28, 2022 (Nanowerk News) A new publication from Opto-Electronic Science considers optical logic gates in future computers ("All-optical logic gate computing for high-speed parallel information processing"). If you are reading this on your smartphone, its CPU (central processing unit) is running at its full speed. It is a tiny...

Quantum effects in memristive devices

Sep 27, 2022 (Nanowerk News) At the nanoscale, the laws of classical physics suddenly become inadequate to explain the behavior of matter. It is precisely at this juncture that quantum theory comes into play, effectively describing the physical phenomena characteristic of the atomic and subatomic world. Thanks to the different...