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Category: engineering – Page 92

Researchers make sand that flows uphill

Engineering researchers at Lehigh University have discovered that sand can actually flow uphill.

The team’s findings were published today in the journal Nature Communications. A corresponding video shows what happens when torque and an is applied to each grain—the grains flow uphill, up walls, and up and down stairs.

“After using equations that describe the flow of granular materials,” says James Gilchrist, the Ruth H. and Sam Madrid Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in Lehigh’s P.C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Science and one of the authors of the paper, “we were able to conclusively show that these particles were indeed moving like a , except they were flowing uphill.”

Submerged Signals: MIT Unveils Pioneering Development in Underwater Communication Technology

The system could be used for battery-free underwater communication across kilometer-scale distances, to aid monitoring of climate and coastal change.

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Copper-infused nanocrystals boost infrared light conversion

Sunlight is an inexhaustible source of energy, and utilizing sunlight to generate electricity is one of the cornerstones of renewable energy. More than 40% of the sunlight that falls on Earth is in the infrared, visible and ultraviolet spectra; however, current solar technology utilizes primarily visible and ultraviolet rays. Technology to utilize the full spectrum of solar radiation—called all-solar utilization—is still in its infancy.

A team of researchers from Hokkaido University, led by Assistant Professor Melbert Jeem and Professor Seiichi Watanabe at the Faculty of Engineering, have synthesized tungstic acid–based materials doped with copper that exhibited all-solar utilization. Their findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials.

“Currently, the near-and mid-infrared spectra of solar radiation, ranging from 800 nm to 2,500 nm, is not utilized for energy generation,” explains Jeem. “Tungstic acid is a candidate for developing nanomaterials that can potentially utilize this spectrum, as it possesses a crystal structure with defects that absorb these wavelengths.”

New nanotech weapon takes aim at hard-to-treat breast cancer

Breast cancer in its various forms affects more than 250,000 Americans a year. One particularly aggressive and hard-to-treat type is triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), which lacks specific receptors targeted by existing treatments. The rapid growth and metastasis of this cancer also make it challenging to manage, leading to limited therapy options and an often poor prognosis for patients.

A promising new approach that uses minuscule tubes to deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to the tumor site while preserving has been developed by Johns Hopkins engineers. The team’s research appeared in Nanoscale.

“In this paper, we showed that we can use to specifically target both proliferating and senescent TNBC cells with chemotherapeutics and senolytics, killing them without targeting healthy breast cells,” said Efie Kokkoli, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, a core researcher at the Johns Hopkins Institute for NanoBioTechnology, and a specialist in engineering targeted nanoparticles for the delivery of cancer therapeutics.

A zero-carbon transport sector needs smart EV charging

Decarbonising Australia’s transport systems will take more than a transition to electric vehicles. Understanding how and when owners like to charge their cars is important. Our researchers are examining how we might persuade the increasing electricity demand to meet the time-dependent renewable energy supply.

How many people do you know who own an electric vehicle? Most Australians still drive petrol-fuelled cars. But the proportion of electric vehicles (EVs) on our roads is set to boom in coming years, particularly if the government’s plans to introduce a fuel efficiency standard prove successful.

Transport researchers at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology have studied the expectations EV owners have for charging – and what they think of policies and technologies that aim to shape EV charging behaviours.

Laser-based system achieves noncontact medical ultrasound imaging

🏅 R&D 100 Award Winner 🏅

The Noncontact Laser Ultrasound (NCLUS) is a portable laser-based system that acquires ultrasound images of human tissue without touching a patient. It offers capabilities comparable to those of an MRI and CT but at vastly lower cost in an automated and portable platform.

In addition to receiving an R&D 100 Award, NCLUS received the Silver Medal in the Special Recognition: Market Disruptor Products category. Congratulations to the NCLUS team!

Researchers from MIT Lincoln Laboratory and their collaborators at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Center for Ultrasound Research and Translation (CURT) have developed a new medical imaging device: the Noncontact Laser Ultrasound (NCLUS). This laser-based ultrasound system provides images of interior body features such as organs, fat, muscle, tendons, and blood vessels. The system also measures bone strength and may have the potential to track disease stages over time.

“Our patented skin-safe laser system concept seeks to transform medical ultrasound by overcoming the limitations associated with traditional contact probes,” explains principal investigator Robert Haupt, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory’s Active Optical Systems Group. Haupt and senior staff member Charles Wynn are co-inventors of the technology, with assistant group leader Matthew Stowe providing technical leadership and oversight of the NCLUS program. Rajan Gurjar is the system integrator lead, with Jamie Shaw, Bert Green, Brian Boitnott (now at Stanford University), and Jake Jacobsen collaborating on optical and mechanical engineering and construction of the system.

Medical ultrasound in practice

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A linear path to efficient quantum technologies

Researchers at the University of Stuttgart have demonstrated that a key ingredient for many quantum computation and communication schemes can be performed with an efficiency that exceeds the commonly assumed upper theoretical limit—thereby opening up new perspectives for a wide range of photonic quantum technologies.

Quantum science has not only revolutionized our understanding of nature—it is also inspiring groundbreaking new computing, communication and sensor devices. Exploiting in such “quantum technologies” typically requires a combination of deep insight into the underlying quantum-physical principles, systematic methodological advances, and clever engineering.

And it is precisely this combination that researches in the group of Prof. Stefanie Barz at the University of Stuttgart and the Center for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology (IQST) have delivered in a recent study, in which they have improved the efficiency of an essential building block of many quantum devices beyond a seemingly inherent limit. The work is published in the journal Science Advances.

Experimental quantum imaging distillation with undetected light

It is possible to image an object with an induced coherence effect by making use of photon pairs to gain information on the item of interest—without detecting the light probing it. While one photon illuminates the object, its partner alone is detected, thereby preventing the measurements of coincidence events to reveal information of the sought after object. This method can be made resilient to noise, as well.

In a new report published in Science Advances, Jorge Fuenzalida and a team in applied optics, precision engineering and theory communications in Germany experimentally showed how the method can be made resilient to noise. They introduced an imaging-distilled approach based on the interferometric modulation of the signal of interest to generate a high-quality image of an object regardless of the extreme noise levels surpassing the actual signal of interest.

Quantum imaging is a promising field that is emerging with valid advantages when compared to classical protocols. Researchers have demonstrated this method across different scenarios to work in the low-photon flux regime by making use of undetected probing photons for super-resolution imaging.

Harnessing the Void: MIT Controls Quantum Randomness For the First Time

Are you down with MIT, yeah you know me! Who’s down with MIT? Every last homie! Haha seriously though, that’s genius to figure out this stuff.

Groundbreaking study demonstrates control over quantum fluctuations, unlocking potential for probabilistic computing and ultra-precise field sensing.

A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances. Their stated goal is to make a better world through education, research, and innovation.

Tesla’s $25,000 “next-generation car” will have a Cybertruck design

The long-promised more affordable Tesla electric car might debut alongside an automated robotaxi.

Tesla is reportedly preparing to build a $25,000 electric car built on the company’s next-generation engineering platform. Axios.

The $25,000 car reportedly has a futuristic design like the long-delayed Cybertruck — the angular pickup truck that Tesla first revealed in 2019. The Cybertruck will supposedly begin production this year, with production-at-scale beginning in 2024.

Who knows when we’ll actually see a $25,000 Tesla.

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