News by Subject Technology & Engineering

A smart watch that takes the user to another dimension and a smart ring that provides powerful feedback are among the top technology Dartmouth College will bring to the 30th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017).

Many of today's technologies, such as, solid-state lighting, transistors in computer chips, and batteries in cell phones rely simply on the charge of the electron and how it moves through the material. In certain materials, such as the monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs), electrons can be selectively placed into a chosen electronic valley using optical excitation.

It's really surprising: it turns out that among simple electronic circuits, built of just a few components, many of them behave chaotically, in an extremely complicated, practically unpredictable manner. Physicists from the Institute of Nuclear Physics Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow have discovered, examined and described dozens of new, unusual circuits of this type. What is especially interesting is that one of the circuits generates voltage pulses very similar to those produced by neurons, only it does so a thousand times faster.

'The autonomous HydroCamel II integrates state-of-the-art technologies, including high-level maneuvering in six degrees of freedom and an ability to dive almost vertically,' says Professor Hugo Guterman of the BGU Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and head of LAR. 'Until now, these capabilities were limited to remotely operated underwater vehicles (ROVs), which must be tethered by an umbilical cable to a host ship for its power and air source. The HydroCamel II is completely autonomous.'

A multidisciplinary group that includes the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Washington at Tacoma has developed a novel platform to diagnose infectious disease at the point-of-care, using a smartphone as the detection instrument in conjunction with a test kit in the format of a credit card.