Reinventing the wheel -- naturally

Humans did not invent the wheel. Nature did. While the evolution from the Neolithic solid stone wheel with a single hole for an axle to the sleek wheels of today's racing bikes can be seen as the result of human ingenuity, ...

Research that holds water

(Phys.org) —It's squishy, synthetic, flexible, mostly water and almost as tough as rubber. No, it's not "flubber"—it's a hydrogel, and now scientists at The University of Akron are exploring new biomedical uses for this ...

New material could efficiently power tiny generators

(PhysOrg.com) -- To power a very small device like a pacemaker or a transistor, you need an even smaller generator. The components that operate the generator are smaller yet, and the efficiency of those foundational components ...

Researchers develop new physical face cloning method

Animatronics aims at creating physical robots that move and look like real humans. Many impressive characters have been created in this spirit, like those in the Hall of Presidents attraction at Walt Disney World. Until now, ...

Sound waves replace human hands in petri dish experiments

Mechanical engineers at Duke University have demonstrated a set of prototypes for manipulating particles and cells in a Petri dish using sound waves. The devices, known in the scientific community as "acoustic tweezers," ...

Giant piezoelectric effect to improve MEMS devices

Researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and the Materials Research Institute at Penn State are part of a multidisciplinary team of researchers from universities and national laboratories across ...

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