News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Using stimuli-responsive materials and geometric principles, Penn Engineers have designed structures that have 'embodied logic.' Through their physical and chemical makeup alone, they are able to determine which of multiple possible responses to make in response to their environment.

A new wave of semiconductors that can be painted on is on the horizon. It bears the promise of revolutionizing lighting all over again and of transforming solar energy. Ornate quantum particle action, revealed here, that drives the new material's properties defies the workings of established semiconductors.

Keeping road pavement in good shape saves money and energy and reduces greenhouse gas emissions, more than offsetting pollution generated during road construction, according to a Rutgers-led study. The study appears in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation.

Researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, have developed a new mathematical tool, which can improve our understanding of what happens when cells lose their polarity (direction) in diseases such as cancer. The result is advancing our understanding of how the fertilized egg cell develops into a complete organism. Biological shapes, like individual organs or an entire body, can be reproduced or maintained with great accuracy, just like in the embryonic development or during the adult stage.

Two new species of fungi have made an appearance in a rapidly melting glacier on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, just west of Greenland. A collaborative team of researchers from Japan's National Institute of Polar Research, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies in Tokyo, Japan, and Laval University in Québec, Canada made the discovery.

For the first time, researchers performed logic operations -- the basis of computation -- with a chemical device using electric fields and ultraviolet light. The device and the pioneering methods used open up research possibilities including low-power, high-performance computer chips.

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design and Shanghai Jiao Tong University have designed and fabricated a fast-response, stiffness tunable (FRST) soft actuator which is able to complete a softening-stiffening cycle within 32 seconds.