Stanford engineers have found out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil. Unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels (which become less ... »
Although we already wrote about lotus biomimicry for water-repelling surfaces, in this article we’re going to write about a surface with similar properties. Engineering researchers have created what they say is a “nearly perfect hydrophobic interface” by mimicking spiders. By using plastic to reproduce the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on ... »
Tiny snails sitting on the ocean floor might seem defenseless against a large, determined predator such as a crab. But evolution has provided one species of sea snail with a unique iron-plated armored shell that resists such attacks. The snail has evolved a tri-layered shell structure consisting of an outer layer embedded with iron sulfide ... »
Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and supercapacitors in the form of everyday paper. The research team led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, includes postdoctoral scholars Liangbing Hu and JangWook Choi, and graduate student Yuan Yang. Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made ... »
The world of microorganisms is a dynamic one and all forms of life depend on microbial metabolic activity. In fact, there are more microbes living on and in every human being than there are human cells in our bodies. At the most basic level, there are microorganisms that are harmless or offer beneficial functions to ... »
Researchers, from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, are also working on capsule additives designed to heal failures in lithium-ion battery electrodes, to prevent the short-circuiting that can sometimes cause a fire. Capsules filled with conductive nanotubes that rip open under mechanical stress could be placed on circuit boards in the areas that are important ... »
For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery. Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team said “The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being ... »
