Rolling locomotion using an external force such as gravity has evolved many times.  However, some caterpillars can curl into a wheel and generate their own rolling momentum as part of an escape repertoire.  This change in body conformation occurs well within 100 ms and generates a linear velocity over 0.2 m s−1, making it one [...]

Where some people hear noise, Jeong Ho You hears energy.  “Acoustic energy is everywhere,” he says.  And with the help of a tiny resonating chamber, he wants to trap some of that energy and convert it into a low-amperage current for use in small electronic devices.  The siren song of acoustic energy is soft — [...]

To design prosthetic limbs with motor control and a sense of touch, researchers have been looking at ways to connect electrodes to nerve endings on the arm or leg and then to translate signals from those nerves into electrical instructions for moving the mechanical limb.  However, severed nerve cells on an amputated limb can only [...]

Graphene paper (GP) has been prepared by flow-directed assembly of graphene nanosheets.  The mechanical properties of as-prepared GPs were investigated by tensile, indentation, and bending tests.  Heat treated GPs demonstrate superior hardness, ten times that of synthetic graphite, and two times that of carbon steel; besides, their yielding strength is significantly higher than that of [...]

Traffic websites, with their color-coded maps of clogged streets and freeways, are good at telling commuters when congestion is already awful.  But what if they could know not only where you drive, but if the route is going to be bad today, and warned you ahead of time?  A team of researchers at IBM Corp. [...]

As 20-year-old Hailey Daniswicz flexes muscles in her thigh, electrodes attached to her leg instruct a computer avatar to flex its knee and ankle — parts of Hailey’s leg that have been missing since 2005.  Daniswicz, a sophomore at Northwestern University who lost her lower leg to bone cancer, is training the computer to recognize [...]

A University of Pittsburgh-led team has created a single-electron transistor that provides a building block for new, more powerful computer memories, advanced electronic materials, and the basic components of quantum computers.  The researchers report that the transistor’s central component — an island only 1.5 nanometers in diameter — operates with the addition of only one [...]

Bridging the gap between on-campus theories and real world practice is a difficult step for anyone, requiring hard work, patience and growth.  For six Brigham Young University students, that opportunity came somewhat early, as the team of engineers became an integral part of bringing clean water to Tanzania and other impoverished countries through their capstone [...]

Obsolescence is the curse of electronics: no sooner have you bought a gadget than its hardware is outdated. A new, low cost type of microchip that can rearrange its design on the fly could change that.  The logic gates on the chip can be reconfigured to implement an improved design as soon as it becomes [...]

For most of the 20th century, the paradigm of wireless communication was a radio station with a single high-power transmitter.  As long as you were within 20 miles or so of the transmitter, you could pick up the station.  With the advent of cell phones, however, and even more so with Wi-Fi, the paradigm became [...]