In the next years, increasing use of electronic devices in consumables and new technologies for the internet of things will increase the amount of electronic scrap. To save resources and minimize waste volumes, an eco-friendlier production and more sustainable...
Rutgers University-New Brunswick engineers have created a 3-D-printed smart gel that walks underwater and grabs objects and moves them. The watery creation could lead to soft robots that mimic sea animals like the octopus, which can walk underwater and bump...
A research team led by the University of California San Diego has discovered the root cause of why lithium metal batteries fail—bits of lithium metal deposits break off from the surface of the anode during discharging and are trapped...
A molecule of ammonia, NH3, typically exists as an umbrella shape, with three hydrogen atoms fanned out in a nonplanar arrangement around a central nitrogen atom. This umbrella structure is very stable and would normally be expected to require...
University of Colorado Boulder researchers have developed a new approach to designing more sustainable buildings with help from some of the tiniest contractors out there. In a study that will appear Jan. 15 in the journal Matter, engineer Wil Srubar and...
In a September 2020 essay in Nature Energy, three scientists posed several "grand challenges"—one of which was to find suitable materials for thermal energy storage devices that could be used in concert with solar energy systems. Fortuitously, Mingda Li—the Norman...
Benedetto Marelli, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, was a postdoc at Tufts University's Omenetto Lab when he stumbled upon a novel use for silk. Preparing for a lab-wide cooking competition whose one requirement was to...
A research team from Caltech and the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering has demonstrated a promising way to efficiently convert carbon dioxide into ethylene—an important chemical used to produce plastics, solvents, cosmetics and other important products globally. The scientists developed...
Using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, Columbia Engineers are first to observe how CO2 is activated at the electrode-electrolyte interface; their finding shifts the catalyst design from trial-and-error paradigm to a rational approach and could lead to alternative, cheaper, and safer...
In pharmacology, not all molecular structures are created equal. Some frameworks are overrepresented in nature, making them especially attractive to scientists on the hunt for more effective drugs. One such structure, known to scientists as the carbocyclic 5-8-5 fused ring...
A virus, the simplest physical object in biology, consists of a protein shell called the capsid, which protects its nucleic acid genome—RNA or DNA. The capsid can be cylindrical or conical in shape, but more commonly it assumes an...