Archive for the ‘electronics’ category
May 18, 2022
New powerful MRI scanners may help to treat Parkinson’s disease better
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: biotech/medical, electronics
New treatment options for neuronal diseases require better imaging techniques that will help find which patients will benefits from these treatments.
May 17, 2022
ETH Zürich’s ANYmal has made major strides since it first burst onto the scene
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: electronics
May 17, 2022
Tiny drone based on maple seed pod doubles flight time
Posted by Josh Seeherman in categories: drones, electronics
Anyone else find it fascinating that we have all this tech and still can’t compete with nature?
A trio of researchers at City University of Hong Kong has developed a tiny drone based on the maple seed pod. In their paper published in the journal Science Robotics, Songnan Bai, Qingning He and Pakpong Chirarattananon, describe how they used the maple seed pod as an inspiration for increasing flight time in under 100-gram drones.
Maple seed pods are well known for their helicopter-type design. As they fall from the tree, they spin like a helicopter rotor with no engine, increasing their distance from the tree as they are blown afar. In this new effort, the researchers sought to take advantage of the efficiency inherent in the structure of the maple seed pod to increase flight time for tiny drones. To that end, they built a tiny drone that can spin like the maple seed pod to keep aloft. The resulting drone could fly for nearly twice as long as those with a traditional four-rotor design.
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May 11, 2022
Laser bursts drive fastest-ever logic gates
Posted by Dan Breeden in category: electronics
A long-standing quest for science and technology has been to develop electronics and information processing that operate near the fastest timescales allowed by the laws of nature.
A promising way to achieve this goal involves using laser light to guide the motion of electrons in matter, and then using this control to develop electronic circuit elements—a concept known as lightwave electronics.
Remarkably, lasers currently allow us to generate bursts of electricity on femtosecond timescales—that is, in a millionth of a billionth of a second. Yet our ability to process information in these ultrafast timescales has remained elusive.
Apr 21, 2022
Sapphire fiber could enable cleaner energy and air-travel
Posted by Jamal Simpson in categories: electronics, energy
Oxford University researchers have developed a sensor made of sapphire fiber that can tolerate extreme temperatures, with the potential to enable significant improvements in efficiency and emission reduction in aerospace and power generation.
The work, published in the journal Optics Express, uses a sapphire optical fiber —a thread of industrially grown sapphire less than half a millimeter thick—which can withstand temperatures over 2000°C. When light is injected onto one end of the sapphire fiber, some is reflected back from a point along the fiber which has been modified to be sensitive to temperature (known as a Bragg grating). The wavelength (color) of this reflected light is a measure of the temperature at that point.
The research resolves a 20-year-old problem with existing sensors—while the sapphire fiber seems very thin, in comparison to the wavelength of light it is huge. This means that the light can take many different paths along the sapphire fiber, which results in many different wavelengths being reflected at once. The researchers overcame this problem by writing a channel along the length of the fiber, such that the light is contained within a tiny cross-section, one-hundredth of a millimeter in diameter. With this approach, they were able to make a sensor that predominantly reflects a single wavelength of light.
Apr 14, 2022
A New Resin 3D Printer Combines a CT Scanner and Light to Increase its Speed
Posted by Omuterema Akhahenda in categories: biotech/medical, electronics
At the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), a team of researchers have developed a new kind of 3D printer whose technology combines a CT scanner and light. By reversing the principle of CT scanning, they could create all types of parts in record time from different polymer resins and play on their hardness. They would thus be able to reproduce the appearance of blood vessels or muscle tissue.
Today’s CT scans allow us to make slice images of our body parts and to visualize tissues of different densities. This X-ray machine is therefore used in the medical sector to establish a diagnosis. In this case, it was used to design a new, faster resin 3D printer.
Apr 13, 2022
These temporary tattoos measure glucose
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: chemistry, electronics
Circa 2015
Researchers have taken a regular gel pen and turned it into a DIY chemical sensor.
Apr 13, 2022
Colour-changing sensor raises a pink flag to hydrogen leaks
Posted by Shubham Ghosh Roy in categories: electronics, energy
A simple colour change could indicate the presence of potentially hazardous hydrogen gas thanks to a new sensor developed by researchers in Germany. The micron-scale device, which uses so-called “supraparticles” that turn from purple to pink in the presence of hydrogen, could help prevent explosions by making it easier to detect and localize leaks at fuel stations, generators and pipelines.
Apr 5, 2022
Gigajot Announces the World’s Highest Resolution Photon Counting Sensor
Posted by Jeremy Dylan Batterson in category: electronics
41 Megapixel Quanta Image Sensor’s Low Light and HDR Imaging Capabilities with Small Pixels are Unrivaled in the Market.
PASADENA, Calif. 0, April 4, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — Gigajot Technology, inventors and developers of Quanta Image Sensors (QIS), today announced the expansion of its groundbreaking QIS product portfolio with the GJ04122 sensor and associated QIS41 camera. With market leading low read noise, the GJ04122 sensor is capable of photon counting and photon number resolving at room temperature. The QIS41 camera, built around the GJ04122 sensor, pairs well with standard 4/3-inch microscopy optics, bringing unparalleled resolution and low light performance to scientific and industrial imaging applications.