Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 31


Tiny jet engines The Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems has developed the world´s smallest jet engine. Samuel Sánchez, a researcher from the Stuttgart, Germany-based R&D organization, officially received the Guinness World Record certification for the smallest nanotube travelling through fluid. The technology makes use of propulsion, which resembles the characteristics of a ... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 31


Software enables cars to auto-report diagnostics Thanks to researchers at MIT, it may soon be possible to hop into a ride-share car, glance at a smartphone app, and tell the driver that the car’s left front tire needs air, its air filter should be replaced next week, and its engine needs two new spark plugs. [caption id="attachment_409967" align="alignnone" width="300"] A new smartphone a... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 31


Battery material supplies Researchers at MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Rochester Institute of Technology conducted an analysis of whether there are enough raw materials to support increased lithium-ion battery production, expected to grow significantly due to electric vehicles and grid-connected battery systems. They conclude that while in the near future there shou... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 24


Redefining unit measurements At a recent meeting, the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM) took the next step towards the expected redefinition of four base units within the International System of Units (SI). The SI base units include the following metrics or constants--meter, kilogram, second, ampere, kelvin, mole, and the candela. Here’s the fundamental constant... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 24


Optical communication on silicon chips With the huge increase in computing performance in recent decades achieved by squeezing ever more transistors into a tighter space on microchips, at the same time this downsizing has also meant packing the wiring within microprocessors ever more tightly together. This has led to effects such as signal leakage between components, which can slow down commun... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 24


Molecular storage Chemists at the Institut Charles Sadron and Aix-Marseille University used mass spectrometry to read several bytes of data recorded on the molecular scale with synthetic polymers, setting a new benchmark for the amount of data stored as a sequence of molecular units (monomers) that can be read. Polymers have great potential since, to record a bit, their component monomers r... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 17


WIMP dark matter detector The LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Group has taken another step towards finding an elusive part of the universe—dark matter. The LZ Group consists of 250 scientists and engineers from 37 institutions in the U.S., U.K., Portugal, Russia and Korea. In 2012, the group built the so-called Large Underground Xenon (LUX) dark matter detector. The detector is based on a 370 kilogram ... » read more

Power/Performance Bits: Oct. 17


Harvesting body heat Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology developed a flexible, wearable thermoelectric generator that can harvest energy from body heat to power simple biosensors. Thermoelectric generators have been available for decades, but standard designs use inflexible inorganic materials that are too toxic for use in wearable devices. The team's device uses thousands... » read more

System Bits: Oct. 17


Piezoelectric, ingestible sensors With an aim to help doctors diagnose gastrointestinal disorders that slow down the passage of food through the digestive tract, MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have built a flexible sensor that can be rolled up and swallowed. Once ingested, the sensor adheres to the stomach wall or intestinal lining, where it can measure the rhythmic con... » read more

Manufacturing Bits: Oct. 10


5/2 fractional states Using a powerful magnet, Columbia University has observed a quantum particle in a bilayer graphene material, an event referred to as a 5/2 fractional quantum state. The observation could bring the industry closer to quantum computing. More specifically, researchers from Columbia said that they have observed “an anomaly in condensed matter physics—the even-denominat... » read more

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