Instead of inserting a card or scanning a smartphone to make a payment, a new technology enables you to simply touch the machine with your finger. The prototype lets the body act as the link between a card or smartphone and the reader or scanner, making it possible to transmit information just by to

The United Nations predicts that by 2050 many areas of the planet may not have enough fresh water to meet the demands of agriculture if we continue our current patterns of use. One solution to this global dilemma is the development of more efficient irrigation, central to which is precision monitori

Current research on flexible electronics is paving the way for wireless sensors that can be worn on the body and collect a variety of medical data. But without a similar flexible transmitting device, these sensors would require wired connections to transmit health data. Like wearable sensors, a wear

Detection of carbon dioxide (CO2) is very important for environmental, health, safety, and space applications. Carbon dioxide is a harmful pollutant at higher concentrations due to its ability to displace oxygen in large concentrations. Current commercial sensors for CO2 have issues and shortcomings

Low-cost, large-scale liquid rocket engines with regeneratively cooled nozzles will enable reliable and reduced-cost access to space. Coolant contained under high pressure circulates through a bank of channels within the nozzle to properly cool the nozzle walls to withstand high temperatures and pre

People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) suffer from a gradual decline in their ability to control their muscles. As a result, they often lose the ability to speak, making it difficult to communicate with others. A team of researchers has designed a stretchable, skin-like device that can be a

From wind turbines and electric motors to sensors, permanent magnets are used in many electrical applications. The production of these magnets usually involves sintering or injection molding. But due to the increasing miniaturization of electronics and more exacting requirements placed on magnetic c

There are some tasks that traditional robots — the rigid and metallic kind — cannot perform. Soft-bodied robots may be able to interact with people more safely or slip into tight spaces with ease. But for robots to reliably complete their programmed duties, they need to know the whereabouts of all t

A two-legged robot named Little Hermes was designed with humanlike reflexes and is guided by a person from a remote location who feels the same physical forces the robot is experiencing. The small-scale bipedal robot is designed to go places deemed unsafe for humans. Much of the current human-operat

Researchers have discovered a way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair — small enough to

Researchers demonstrated an atom-based sensor that can determine the direction of an incoming radio signal, another key part for a potential atomic communications system that could be smaller and work better in noisy environments than conventional technology. The capability to measure a signal’s “

A programmable fiber was developed that could transmit data from military uniforms. The fiber could generate power, provide vital information about the wearer’s physiology and environmental exposures, provide their location to a team, and alert someone if they incur an injury. Ultimately, uniforms w

A new approach to studying conjugated polymers enabled researchers to measure, for the first time, the individual molecules’ mechanical and kinetic properties during polymerization reaction. Conjugated polymers are essentially clusters of molecules strung along a backbone that can conduct electron

Who The durable soft electronics could be used in wearable electronics and soft robotics and could someday be part of a stretchable smartphone. What Skin-like electronic circuits are soft and stretchy, sustain numerous damage events under load without losing electrical conductivity, and can be recyc

Touch, or tactile sensing, is fundamentally important for a range of real-life applications, from robotics to surgical medicine to sports science. Tactile sensors are modeled on the biological sense of touch and can help researchers understand human perception and motion. A new approach to pressure

Researchers have developed “electronic skin” sensors capable of mimicking the dynamic process of human motion. They attempted to imitate the biological and dynamic process of the skin of the human hand to enable objects to behave similarly. The dual-mode sensor measures both the magnitude and load o

Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and services in the fields of health and medicine, consumer goods, transportation, public safety, computer technology, and environmental r

Researchers have developed graphene-based sensing technology using G-Putty material — a highly malleable graphene blended putty. The printed sensors are 50 times more sensitive than the industry standard and outperform other comparable nano-enabled sensors in an important metric: flexibility. Maximi

Scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory (Upton, NY) have identified the primary cause of failure in a state-of-the-art lithium-metal battery — of interest for long-range electric vehicles. Using high-energy X-rays, they followed the cycling-induced changes at thousands of different points acr

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies have seen remarkable adoption in the industry over recent years. As digitalization and on-demand manufacturing shift the face of production sites to fully automated operating lines, reliable process monitoring methods are becoming increasingly important. In l