A new, open-road test of adaptive cruise control demonstrated that the feature, designed to make driving easier by continuously adjusting a vehicle’s speed in response to the car ahead, doesn’t yet solve the problem of phantom traffic jams. Because human drivers are responsible for the creation of this type of jam – which occurs without […]
Getting Robotic Surgical Tools From The Lab To The Operating Room
The path from university lab to commercialization is especially complex in the biotech industry. Challenges range from long lead times, sometimes measured in decades, to the costs of transforming ideas into innovations, as well as issues of intellectual property, patenting and licensing. Yet Nabil Simaan, a mechanical engineering professor who specializes in designing robots to […]
Ultrathin Device Harvests Electricity From Human Motion
Imagine slipping into a jacket, shirt or skirt that powers your cell phone, fitness tracker and other personal electronic devices as you walk, wave and even when you are sitting. A new, ultrathin energy harvesting system developed at Vanderbilt University’s Nanomaterials and Energy Devices Laboratory has the potential to do just that. Based on battery […]
Cotton Candy Capillaries Lead To Circuit Boards That Dissolve When Cooled
Building transient electronics is usually about doing something to make them stop working: blast them with light, soak them with acid, dunk them in water. Professor Leon Bellan’s idea is to dissolve them with neglect: Stop applying heat, and they come apart. Using silver nanowires embedded in a polymer that dissolves in water below 32 […]
Making America’s Power Grid Much, Much Smarter
Remember back in 2003 when overgrown trees hit a power line in Cleveland and cut electricity to 50 million people in two countries? Or how about the storm that disrupted service to 1.7 million customers in Australia in September after backup generators failed? A team of researchers from Vanderbilt, Washington State and North Carolina State […]
Particles from Outer Space Are Wreaking Low-Grade Havoc On Personal Electronics
You may not realize it but alien subatomic particles raining down from outer space are wreaking low-grade havoc on your smartphones, computers and other personal electronic devices. When your computer crashes and you get the dreaded blue screen or your smartphone freezes and you have to go through the time-consuming process of a reset, most […]
Mood Ring Materials: New Way To Detect Damage In Failing Infrastructure
“Mood ring materials” could play an important role in minimizing and mitigating damage to the nation’s failing infrastructure. The American Society of Civil Engineers has estimated that more than $3.6 trillion in investment is needed by 2020 to rehabilitate and modernize the nation’s failing infrastructure. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to establish a $1 trillion […]
Converting Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Into Batteries
An interdisciplinary team of scientists has worked out a way to make electric vehicles that are not only carbon neutral, but carbon negative, capable of actually reducing the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide as they operate. They have done so by demonstrating how the graphite electrodes used in the lithium-ion batteries that power electric automobiles […]
Quantum Dots Made From Fool’s Gold Boost Battery Performance
If you add quantum dots – nanocrystals 10,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair – to a smartphone battery it will charge in 30 seconds, but the effect only lasts for a few recharge cycles. However, a group of researchers at Vanderbilt University report in the Nov. 11 issue of the journal […]
Mechanical Wrist Gives New Dexterity to Needlescopic Surgery
With the flick of a tiny mechanical wrist, a team of engineers and doctors at Vanderbilt University‘s Medical Engineering and Discovery Laboratory hope to give needlescopic surgery a whole new degree of dexterity. Needlescopic surgery, which uses surgical instruments shrunk to the diameter of a sewing needle, is the ultimate form of minimally invasive surgery. […]