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Category: engineering – Page 7

Repurposing deep-Earth tools in the hunt for practical superconductors

If scientists could find a material that acts as a superconductor—that is, one that transmits energy with zero resistance—at normal pressures and relatively high temperatures, it would open up a vast number of possibilities. These include medical imaging, quantum computing and numerous other fields. So, yes, it would be a big deal.

“Right now, almost 50% of the energy in transmission is just heat in copper wires,” said Shomeek Mukhopadhyay. “If you can transmit electricity through wires without dissipating energy, that’s a huge economic benefit. I would say it’s equivalent to having thermonuclear fusion.”

Mukhopadhyay, a research scientist in Chemical & Environmental Engineering, is on the third floor of the Kline Geology Laboratory. Nearby, Natalia Nevskaya, a postdoctoral associate in Earth & Planetary Sciences, prepares a massive device called the Kawai multi-anvil press.

New quantum microscopy trick quadruples microscope resolution

Three years after a team of Caltech scientists showed that pairs of entangled photons could double the resolution of a light microscope, the same lab has figured out a way to double down on that improvement. They have now achieved a fourfold resolution boost compared to a classical microscope, using a new optical design that sends one of the entangled photons through the microscope’s optics three times rather than just once.

The work, led by Lihong Wang, the Bren Professor of Medical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and the Andrew and Peggy Cherng Medical Engineering Leadership Chair at Caltech, builds on the lab’s 2023 demonstration of quantum microscopy by coincidence (QMC). The approach relies on one of those bizarre quantum-mechanical phenomena called entanglement, in which two particles are linked such that the state of one particle is intimately tied to the state of the other no matter how far apart they might be.

In QMC, entangled pairs of photons, called biphotons, are split so that one photon, called the signal photon, passes through the sample while its entangled partner, called the idler photon, travels a separate parallel path. In some ways, the pair behaves as a single particle that has twice the momentum of an individual photon.

Single-shot phase imaging technique can reconstruct transparent objects

A KAIST research team led by professor Mooseok Jang from the Department of Bio and Brain Engineering has developed a single-shot phase imaging technique that reconstructs a phase object—a transparent object such as glass, plastic film or a living cell, which produces almost no visible contrast under an ordinary camera but induces a subtle shift in light called a phase change—from a single measurement, even when the object is fully enclosed between two dynamic scattering layers.

The findings are published in the journal Optica.

Phase objects are difficult to see with conventional cameras because they show little brightness contrast with their surroundings. However, analyzing the minute phase shift can reveal an object’s morphology and optical thickness and can be used to determine its physical thickness or refractive index variation when the other quantity is known. For this reason, phase imaging is widely used to observe living cells without staining and to inspect transparent components in semiconductors and displays.

Powerhouses for fake meat: Muscle protein can now be grown in chloroplasts of lettuce and tobacco plants

Livestock farming requires valuable land to grow fodder, uses vast amounts of freshwater and contributes to global warming through methane and nitrous oxide emissions. And, for many consumers it is important to prevent animal suffering. For these reasons, the global market for meat alternatives is currently worth €6.7 billion to €8.1 billion per year and is projected to grow 8.1% to 12.3% each year over the next decade.

One common method for producing fake meat is microbial engineering, in which genes coding for animal proteins are inserted into the genomes of bacteria or yeast for mass production in bioreactors. But now, scientists have developed a promising alternative as a proof of principle.

“Here we show that plants can be engineered to produce the animal protein myoglobin (Mb) in their chloroplasts, the energy factories for photosynthesis. This could provide a more sustainable way to produce an important ingredient for plant-based meat products,” said Dr. Alexia Groff, a researcher at Imperial College London.

Self-repairing, recyclable substrate developed for durable soft sensors

Soft sensors convert movement, temperature and moisture into electrical signals. Repeated bending and friction can cause their metal conductors to peel from the underlying polymer, while physical damage, such as cuts, can disable the device. Commonly used petroleum-derived substrates are also environmentally unfriendly because they are difficult to recycle.

Researchers at the College of Design and Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS CDE) have developed a soft, stretchable substrate that repairs itself, firmly grips metal conductors and can be remolded or broken down after use. It could make wearable patches and electronic skin used in applications such as health monitoring and virtual reality more durable while enabling the recovery of valuable components, thus reducing electronic waste.

The new material, called an intrinsically dynamic biosubstrate (IDBS), was developed by researchers led by assistant professor Zhai Wei from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at NUS CDE. Their findings were published in Nature Sustainability on June 19, 2026.

Polar molecules and polymer bridges overcome two key limits in organic electronics

A research team led by Professor Kang Bosoek of the SKKU Advanced Institute of Nano Technology (SAINT), Department of Nano Engineering and Department of Semiconductor Convergence Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University has developed two new molecular design technologies to enhance the electrical conductivity of organic electronic materials. One technology generates a greater number of charge carriers within a polymer, while the other connects transport pathways so that charge can move without interruption.

The findings were published, respectively, in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and Nature Communications. The paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society was also selected as a cover article.

Organic semiconductors are lightweight and flexible materials expected to be used in next-generation displays, wearable electronics and sensors. However, for practical use in electronic devices, their electrical conductivity must be improved—which requires generating a sufficient amount of charge and ensuring that the charge, once generated, can move rapidly through the material. Through two separate studies, the research team addressed these two challenges in a complementary way.

Pixel patterns harness diffraction for faster, more accurate nanoscale 3D printing

Researchers at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering have developed a new approach to nanoscale 3D printing that improves both speed and fidelity, overcoming a challenge that has limited the technology’s broader use in manufacturing.

Their work, led by Sourabh Saha, associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow, and Harnjoo Kim, who conducted the research during his doctoral studies and later as a postdoctoral fellow in Saha’s lab, was recently published in the journal Nature Communications.

Nanoscale 3D printing allows researchers to create structures thousands of times smaller than the width of a human hair. These structures have potential applications in fields ranging from advanced computing and optics to biomedical devices and clean energy technologies. However, increasing printing speed often comes at the expense of quality.

Ion pumping platform simultaneously cleans salty wastewater and recovers valuable metals

Industrial wastewater from electronics manufacturing, metal processing and other sectors often contains two difficult pollutants at once: high levels of salt and toxic heavy metals. Current treatment methods typically address those problems separately, creating costly, complex systems that can produce hazardous brines or metal-laden sludge. Now, a group of researchers at Rice University and Vanderbilt University has created an electrochemical platform that could do both jobs at once.

A team led by Shihong Lin, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice, has shown that electrochemical ion pumping (EIP) can be programmed to desalinate wastewater while selectively recovering dissolved metals such as copper.

The approach, published in Nature Water, could offer a new path toward water reuse and resource recovery from industrial brines. Longqian Xu, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice, is the study’s first author.

Barry Ptolemy on “Transcendent Man”

In August 2010, I got on the phone with a filmmaker who had spent three years following Ray Kurzweil around the world with a camera.

Barry Ptolemy was twelve years old when he stood on the set of E.T. next to Spielberg. Decades later, he read The Singularity is Near and decided his first feature film would not be fiction.

Transcendent Man had not opened in theaters yet when we spoke. Back then the claims in it sounded like a pitch meeting nobody would greenlight: intelligence that stops being biological, no clean line left between human and machine, aging reversed, world hunger solved, death itself treated as an engineering problem.

Read that list again in 2026 and tell me which line you want to laugh at.

Some of it looks naive now. Some of it looks early. What stayed with me is what Barry said about the man behind the predictions, because the film is not really a documentary about #ArtificialIntelligence. It is a documentary about a son and his father, and about what grief will build if you give it enough compute.

I asked him whether he believed Ray. Sixteen years on, his answer is still the part I turn over in my head when people tell me the #Singularity is finally here.

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