Oct 28, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Centimeter-scale walking and crawling robots are in demand both for their ability to explore tight or cluttered environments and for their low fabrication costs. Now, pulling from origami-inspired construction, researchers led by Cynthia Sung, Gabel Family Term Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics...
Soft, elephant trunk-like robot for close interaction with humans
Oct 28, 2023 (Nanowerk News) At EPFL's CREATE lab, under the guidance of Josie Hughes, a breakthrough has been made in the realm of soft robotics. Drawing inspiration from the versatile movement of elephant trunks and octopus tentacles, the team introduced the trimmed helicoid — a novel robotic structure that...
AI can alert urban planners and policymakers to cities’ decay
Oct 28, 2023 (Nanowerk News) More than two-thirds of the world’s population is expected to live in cities by 2050, according to the United Nations. As urbanization advances around the globe, researchers at the University of Notre Dame and Stanford University said the quality of the urban physical environment will...
Shaping vivid structural color with DLP 3D printing of photonic colloidal glasses
Oct 28, 2023 (Nanowerk Spotlight) From the vivid blues and greens of peacock feathers to the shimmering reds of ruby crystals, structural color in nature provides some of the most dazzling displays that delight our eyes. Unlike pigments that absorb certain wavelengths to produce color, structural color arises from the...
Ultrafast x-ray pulses force atoms to give up their electronic secrets
Oct 28, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A new spectroscopy technique developed by RIKEN researchers could help reveal the inner workings of metal catalysts and the proteins involved in photosynthesis in plants (Nature Communications, "Two-dimensional Kβ-Kα fluorescence spectrum by nonlinear resonant inelastic X-ray scattering"). The method is based on a standard technique...
An artificial intelligence model for effectively removing biases in a dataset
Oct 27, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) announced that the research team of Professor Sang-hyun Park at the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering had developed a new image translation model that could effectively reduce biases in data. In the process of developing an...
Hybrid nanomaterials promise a sustainability boost across multiple industries
Oct 27, 2023 (Nanowerk News) A new class of nanoscale hybrid materials has the potential to improve sustainability across energy systems, transport, biosensors, water purification and even 3D printing, but the field is still very young. A group of researchers has produced a detailed overview of the state of play...
Electrodes with hollow nanotubes improve performance of potassium-ion batteries
Oct 27, 2023 (Nanowerk News) Researchers who are working to find alternatives to lithium-ion batteries have turned their attention to potassium-ion batteries. Potassium is an abundant resource and the technology functions in much the same way as lithium-ion batteries, but these batteries have not been developed at a large scale...