A new photovoltaic material performs as well as the one found in today’s best solar cells, but promises to be significantly cheaper.  The material consists of a flexible array of light-absorbing silicon microwires and light-reflecting metal nanoparticles embedded in a polymer.  Computational models suggest that the material could be used to make solar cells that [...]

Keep your eye on the shelves of your local hardware store, where in the next few years you may be able to find new tape from an unlikely source: the gecko.  “Geckos have millions of microscopic hairs on their toes, each with hundreds of tips that adhere to surfaces, with no residue left behind,” said [...]

The challenge over past decades has been to keep up with Moore’s Law by cramming more and more transistors into the limited real estate provided by silicon chip fabrication methods.  But as future tech leans more heavily on smaller, lighter, more mobile devices with increased computing power, the imperative to slim down chip design while [...]

We show experimentally that thin membrane-type acoustic metamaterials can serve as a total reflection nodal surface at certain frequencies.  The small decay length of the evanescent waves at these frequencies implies that several membrane panels can be stacked to achieve broad-frequency effectiveness.  We report the realization of acoustic metamaterial panels with thickness <=15  mm and [...]

Now, as several major universities finish analyzing data from pilot programs involving the latest version of the Amazon Kindle, officials are learning more about what students want out of their e-reader tablets.  Generally, the colleges found that students missed some of the old-fashioned note-taking tools they enjoyed before.  But they also noted that the shift [...]

Mechanical fireflies could help create a new kind of 3-D display, say researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Standing in for the bioluminescent beetles will be LED-fitted, remotely controlled micro-helicopters that can be choreographed electronically to display shapes and images as they hover in midair.  The project, called Flyfire, would use remote-controlled helicopters similar to [...]

Cars could shed their image as energy hogs and become mobile storage points for the electric grid, if engineers backed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) get their way.  Hybrid electric vehicles might even feed unused electricity back into the grid and earn money for their owners, not unlike how some homeowners who create renewable [...]

Skeleton athletes can reach speeds of over 62 miles per hour as they shoot down a track face-first, on a sled the size of a cushion.  To get ready for the skeleton events taking place today and tomorrow in Vancouver, however, the U.S. Olympic team have been perfecting their aerodynamics without moving at all — [...]

Inexpensive thin-film solar cells aren’t as efficient as conventional solar cells, but a new coating that incorporates nanoscale metallic particles could help close the gap.  Broadband Solar, a startup spun out of Stanford University late last year, is developing coatings that increase the amount of light these solar cells absorb.  Based on computer models and [...]

Prosthetic users typically spend more energy walking on their artificial feet than most people, because the devices cannot replicate the force of a living ankle pushing off the ground.  Now researchers have created a new prosthetic foot that recaptures the mechanical energy between steps.  Test subjects who used a conventional prosthetic foot spent 23 percent [...]