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Is engineering ready for the future?
Counting microscopic particles is hard, but researchers from Russia and Australia believe they've found a way to make it easier.
A new type of metamaterial that can grow when stretched, with possible applications for medical equipment and satellites, was inspired by an unlikely source -- ancient Islamic art.
In Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), the sequel to the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice again enters a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. Though far from Alice’s spectacular feat, scientists at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, […]
In the past years, several types of invisibility cloaks have been developed, hiding objects not only from light, but also from sound and even heat. But this is the first time an invisibility cloak for touch has been developed. Recently, we’ve written quite a lot about invisibility cloaks – how they work, how they can be […]
Using a range of cheap materials arranged in a specific manner, researchers at Duke University have demonstrated a device that captures microwave signals, such as those relayed by WiFi or even satellites high up above in Earth’s orbit, an converts this free, lost energy into electrical current. The harvesting and conversion efficiency of the device […]
Invisibility cloaks have become the object of study for many research institutes out of a number of considerations. There’s the simple scientific thrill of breaching the SciFi barrier, something every researcher dreams of. Then of course, there’s always the corporate and military tail that always likes to meddle with concepts that shine with the possibility […]
It may be a little off to talk about invisibility when we’re not even in the visible spectrum, but ‘invisibility cloak‘ sounds just to awesome not to use it. Using a new kind of cloak that uses a very thin multilayer dielectric coating made of natural material (as opposed to metamaterials which are often used), […]
Scientists at Duke University have devised a metamaterial that uses microwaves to image objects or scenes in real time, all through a set-up no larger than a book. Currently, the same imaging is being made with robust, huge machinery – the kind you see in airports used to scan people before they board flights – […]
Researchers at MIT have created a new metamaterial that they used to fashion a concave lens capable of focusing radio waves with extreme precision. The result lens is extremely lightweight compared to its counterparts developed from conventional materials, and could see promising applications in satellite telecommunications and space exploration of distant stars. In many ways […]
Previously, scientists have managed to devise material that can convert light into electricity, and other materials that can convert heat into electricity. Now, a group of researchers at University of Texas at Arlington have managed to create a hybrid material that can convert both forms of energy at the same time into electricity. This double spanned function […]
The much dreamed off invisibility cloak is just a few tiny steps away, after remarkable research in the field, many backed by military interests, have sparked some amazing advances. In the last few years alone, scientists have managed to successfully cloak various objects either using meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it or […]
Cloaking used to be one of my favorite SciFi themes. James Bond supercars that would show up or disappear instantly at the flick of an alarm key, the hallow man, objects rendered completely invisible to the human eye and lost in the surroundings. I say used to be because spatial cloaking has transcended for some […]
