Quantum dots (QDs) have found so many applications in recent years, they can now be purchased with a variety of composite structures and configurations. Some are available suspended in a biologically friendly fluid, making them well poised to serve as biomarkers for single-molecule tagging and tracking. But suppose you wanted to trap and move one […]
Sophisticated Medical Imaging Technique Proves Useful For Automotive Industry
Many of today’s cars are coated with paint that exhibits a metallic or glittery shine. The exact sparkle and color you see is determined by the distribution and characteristics of tiny metal flakes used in the paint. A new approach based on the medical imaging technique optical coherence tomography (OCT) provides the car industry with […]
Moisture-Responsive ‘Robots’ Crawl With No External Power Source
Using an off-the-shelf camera flash, researchers turned an ordinary sheet of graphene oxide into a material that bends when exposed to moisture. They then used this material to make a spider-like crawler and claw robot that move in response to changing humidity without the need for any external power. “The development of smart materials such […]
New Screen Coating Makes Reading In Sunlight A Lot Easier — The Secret? Moth Eyes
Screens on even the newest phones and tablets can be hard to read outside in bright sunlight. Inspired by the nanostructures found on moth eyes, researchers have developed a new antireflection film that could keep people from having to run to the shade to look at their mobile devices. The antireflection film exhibits a surface […]
New 3-D Display Takes The Eye Fatigue Out Of Virtual Reality
There is a great deal of excitement around virtual reality (VR) headsets that display a computer-simulated world and augmented reality (AR) glasses that overlay computer-generated elements with the real world. Although AR and VR devices are starting to hit the market, they remain mostly a novelty because eye fatigue makes them uncomfortable to use for […]
New Infrared-Emitting Device Could Allow Energy Harvesting From Waste Heat
A new reconfigurable device that emits patterns of thermal infrared light in a fully controllable manner could one day make it possible to collect waste heat at infrared wavelengths and turn it into usable energy. The new technology could be used to improve thermophotovoltaics, a type of solar cell that uses infrared light, or heat, […]
Tiny Sensor Lays Groundwork For Precision X-rays Detection Via Endoscopy
Using a tiny device known as an optical antenna, researchers have created an X-ray sensor that is integrated onto the end of an optical fiber just a few tens of microns in diameter. By detecting X-rays at an extremely small spatial scale, the sensor could be combined with X-ray delivering technologies to enable high-precision medical […]
Electro-Optical Switch Transmits Data at Record-Low Temperatures
A silicon optical switch newly developed at Sandia National Laboratories is the first to transmit up to 10 gigabits per second of data at temperatures just a few degrees above absolute zero. The device could enable data transmission for next-generation superconducting computers that store and process data at cryogenic temperatures. Although these supercomputers are still […]
Novel Liquid Crystal Could Triple Sharpness of Today’s Televisions
An international team of researchers has developed a new blue-phase liquid crystal that could enable televisions, computer screens and other displays that pack more pixels into the same space while also reducing the power needed to run the device. The new liquid crystal is optimized for field-sequential color liquid crystal displays (LCDs), a promising technology […]
Versatile Optical Laser Will Enable Innovative Experiments At Atomic-Scale Measurements
The European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) facility, near Hamburg, Germany, was built with one objective — to provide pulses of light short enough, bright enough, and of small enough wavelength to observe processes that would otherwise be too fast and/or too infrequent to measure in real-time. Without such ultrashort pulses — and this means millionths […]