As many a fancy-refrigerator-owner will know, fingerprints tend to be highly visible on stainless steel. A new transparent coating could help, however, as it goes about reducing the appearance of prints in three ways. Actually a type of varnish, the “sol/gel nano-lacquer” is being developed by Germany’s FEW Chemicals and assessed by a team at the Fraunhofer Institute for Microstructure […]

They’re known as deepfakes – photos or videos that have been very convincingly manipulated to depict people saying or doing things that they never actually said or did. They’re potentially quite the problem, so an experimental new deep neural network has been designed to spot them. Led by Prof. Amit K. Roy-Chowdhury, a team at the University of California, Riverside […]

If you’re making a 2-mm-long walking robot, it pretty much goes without saying that the thing won’t be able to carry much of a battery. That’s why Georgia Tech’s new “micro-bristle-bots” are instead propelled by vibrations. And someday, they may actually be capable of moving within the human body. The robots are 3D printed out of polymer resin, via a […]

From DIY water-testing kits to checking out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s databases, there are various ways you can go about testing whether or not water is safe to drink before you elect to pour it down your throat. Scientists from the University of Missouri and Mexico’s Universidad de Guanajuato have come up with an alternative solution — and it’s […]

In many arid coastal regions, a great quantity of valuable fresh water is lost into the atmosphere every day, as it evaporates from the surface of the ocean. This situation prompted scientists to create a new hydrogel that’s highly effective at capturing moisture from the sea air, and then releasing it as fresh water. Developed by a team at the […]

Incredibly thin, flexible, strong and electrically conductive, graphene has the potential to revolutionize electronics and materials. One of the main hurdles though is that it’s tricky to manufacture on large scales. Now researchers at the University of Rochester have recruited bacteria to make the stuff, which is cheaper and faster than current methods and doesn’t require harsh chemicals. Graphene production […]

How safe would you feel, going back into a multi-story building that had just been through an earthquake? A new sensor system could allay your fears, as it optically measures how much a building has swayed, and thus how damaged it may be. Some buildings already incorporate accelerometers on multiple floors, which are used to determine the extent to which […]

Architecture studio Wallgren Arkitekter and Swedish construction company BOX Bygg have created a parametric design tool called Finch, which can generate floor plans adapted to the constraints of a site. The tool is designed to help architects understand the constraints and potential of a site in the early stages of the design process. Finch will be launched in 2020 as a […]

Engineers from the University of Cambridge have developed a vegetable-picking robot that can autonomously identify and harvest iceberg lettuce, one of the more manually demanding crops for human pickers. Vegebot was trained using a machine-learning algorithm that helped it distinguish healthy lettuces ready for harvest, in a variety of different weather conditions. Agricultural harvesting is one area of industry that […]