Chip fat could soon be used to help hold roads together, thanks to research in Leicestershire (U.K.).  Staff at Bardon Hill-based Aggregate Industries have developed a way of using used vegetable oil instead of bitumen to make asphalt road surfaces.  The discovery could significantly reduce the carbon footprint made by building roads and pavements.  [thisisleicestershire.co.uk, [...]

Skin does more than look good.  It also protects the body from infection, dehydration, and a generally hostile world.  As a result, victims of burns and skin diseases face serious problems beyond the obvious issues of pain and aesthetics.  For years, doctors have tried use synthetic skin for grafts and repairs, but the process to [...]

It is often said there’s no point reinventing the wheel, but when it comes to getting rescue robots into and out of avalanches, that may be just what is needed.  So say researchers in Japan who have developed an adjustable wheel that can adapt to different kinds of snow conditions.  Robots are increasingly used to [...]

Behind the wheel of a car, even the most good-natured people can become impatient, aggressive and reckless.  That probably comes as little surprise: worsening traffic is making travelling by car an increasingly frustrating and unpleasant experience.  Take heart, there is a range of solutions on the horizon.  A new generation of monitoring and data-gathering technologies [...]

The failure probability of engineering structures such as aircraft, bridges, dams, nuclear structures, and ships, as well as microelectronic components and medical implants, must be kept extremely low, typically <10−6.  The safety factors needed to ensure it have so far been assessed empirically.  For perfectly ductile and perfectly brittle structures, the empirical approach is sufficient [...]

The study of flow of non-Newtonian fluids in porous media is very important and serves a wide variety of practical applications in processes such as enhanced oil recovery from underground reservoirs, filtration of polymer solutions, and soil remediation through the removal of liquid pollutants.  These fluids occur in diverse natural and synthetic forms and can [...]

“Superhydrophobic” materials that never get wet have an Achilles’ heel, say chemists: they can fend off cold, but not hot water.  After studying this effect, the team has now designed a new material coating that can repel hot water.  It could be used to make anti-scald clothing, they say, which could help to protect vulnerable [...]

The power gadgets waste when converting alternating current to direct current could be cut by a third by switching to converters that use gallium nitride transistors instead of silicon ones.  These transistors will also make adapters small enough to fit inside a laptop – doing away with the need to carry a separate adapter.  [New [...]

It may look low-tech, but this smart doll’s house could one day change the way we live, its inventors claim.  Part of a project called InterHome, it is designed to test and demonstrate how much greener and secure our homes could be if they incorporated intelligent technologies that adapt to our daily routine.  And it’s [...]

Clothes could one day take snaps of everything happening around whoever is wearing them.  U.S. researchers have made smart fabric that can detect the wavelength and direction of light falling on it.  The research team has found a way to accurately place sensors in each fibre and co-ordinate the electrical signals they send when light [...]