It wasn’t so long ago that 3D printing was the new kid on the block. Now the term 4D printing is making headlines, stretching our ability to conceptualize once again. To understand 4D printing, it helps to have a better familiarity with 3D printing. 3D printing was originally developed in 1984 by Charles Hull. However, it was 2007 before anyone other than businesses and the […]

When a car crashes into a roadside object at an intersection, chances are pretty high that object will be a traffic light pole. If it’s a new energy-absorbing pole, however, the likelihood of injury or even death may be significantly reduced. Traditional street light poles are relatively rigid and unyielding, so collisions with them can be quite nasty for the […]

DARPA has selected Northrop Grumman and the University of Central Florida to develop a prototype augmented reality headset embedded with an AI assistant to help train rotorcraft pilots to deal with unexpected tasks and emergencies. One of the challenges of being a military pilot is that the job requires a lot of multitasking and a very high level of continuous […]

There are many parts of the world which lack infrastructure, but that get a lot of sunlight … which makes buildings uncomfortably hot. A new system could help, as it uses a combination of sunlight and salt water – but no electricity – to produce a cooling effect. Currently being developed at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and […]

According to Israeli startup Tevel Aerobotics, there is a severe shortage of workers available to pick fruit at orchards. That’s why the company is developing an alternative, in the form of autonomous flying drones that do the job. Each of the system’s FAR (Flying Autonomous Robots) units consists of a wheeled base vehicle which travels up and down the rows […]

  Although solar-powered devices are now fairly common, Swedish scientists have created something a little different. They’ve built tiny “metavehicles” that are mechanically propelled and guided via waves of light. Led by Prof. Mikael Käll and former PhD student Daniel Andrén, a team at the Chalmers University of Technology constructed the vehicles by coating microscopic particles with what are known […]

Superconducting quantum computers are huge and incredibly finicky machines at this point. They need to be isolated from anything that might knock an electron’s spin off and ruin a calculation. That includes mechanical isolation, in extreme vacuum chambers, where only a few molecules might remain in a cubic meter or two of space. It includes electromagnetic forces – IBM, for […]

Having flexed its muscles in predicting kidney injury, toppling Go champions and solving 50-year-old science problems, artificial intelligence company DeepMind is now dipping its toes in weather forecasting. The company’s latest tool is designed to predict oncoming precipitation through what’s known as nowcasting, and the vast majority of meteorologists found it to be more accurate than current methods in early […]

While we may think of blue jeans as kind of earthy, basic clothing, the process by which they’re dyed is definitely not eco-friendly. That may soon no longer be the case, however, thanks to the development of a new coloration technique. Ordinarily in the dying of jeans, either natural or (more commonly) synthetic indigo pigment is mixed with water, in […]

There are many parts of the world which lack infrastructure, but that get a lot of sunlight … which makes buildings uncomfortably hot. A new system could help, as it uses a combination of sunlight and salt water – but no electricity – to produce a cooling effect. Currently being developed at Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah University of Science and […]