Machines & Gadgets

The new plane doesn’t use turbines or propellers to fly.  It is powered by the ‘ionic wind’ that produces enough thrust to propel the small aircraft.  Researchers were able to fly it a distance of 60 meters.  The first controlled, heavier-than-air plane was developed in 1903 by Wright brothers. A year later, they came up ...

A German overclocker managed to push the limits of 9th Gen. Intel Core i9-9900K processor, achieving 7.6 GHz on all 8 cores.  He used liquid helium to bring down the chip temperature to nearly -230 degree Celsius.  In fall of 2018, Intel launched its 9th generation Core i9-9900K processor based on Coffee Lake microarchitecture. It’s a 64-bit ...

New single-shot 10-trillion fps compressed ultrafast photography (T-CUP) technique captures any event with 100 femtoseconds frame intervals.  It can be used to study interactions between matter and light at an unprecedented temporal resolution.  The pump-probe methods allow us to capture transient events through repeated measurements. However, several dynamics are either non-repeatable or hard to recreate. For instance, ...

Researchers develop a new system to control flying drones with eyes.  This includes a lightweight eye-tracking glasses and inertial measurement unit.  The glasses provide a 2D gaze coordinates, which is further converted in 3D using a deep neural network.  The popularity of drones has increased over the past few years, and the trend will continue in ...

The non-explosive lithium-ion battery is inspired by an interesting behavior of unique liquids that turn solid on sudden impact. They are made by dispersing spherical silica particles in battery liquid, which block the flow of ions on impact.  The lithium-ion batteries are the most energetic rechargeable batteries available in the market. You can find them ...

New double-layer solar cells use photoactive materials to harvest a wider solar spectrum.  It sets a new record of converting 22.4% of the sunlight into electrical energy.  The double layer solar cell sits on a two-millimeter thick glass substrate. The conventional (single-junction) solar cells convert less than 20 % of sunlight into electricity. Tandem (multi-junction) solar cells, ...

The atomic-scale transistor made of a silver atom is approximately 1 nanometer in size.  It consumes extremely low voltage of the order of 10 mV. This 3-terminal switch can work at room temperature – a big plus point for future applications. For the last 5 decades, the number of transistors per silicon chip has doubled nearly every ...

Engineers designed a new device that could be connected to a low-powered PC/laptop to process large graphs.  It could handle massive graphs with up to 4 billion nodes and 128 billion edges.  Tech companies could use this device to decrease energy footprint by using fewer servers.  In computer science, graphs are structures of nodes and ...

Road bikes are known for their comfortable ride on asphalt and cobblestone, incredible load-caring ability, and on-road racing. These lighter and environment-friendly means of transportation keep you in shape. The key materials that distinguish road bikes from other bicycles are their lightweight frames and skinny tires that don’t go above 0.9 – 1.1 inches. Two cogs ...

Dactyl learns to solve the object reorientation task through simulations, without requiring any human intervention.  It can analyze fingertips’ coordinates and images from 3 conventional RGB cameras.  They used MuJoCo physics engine to measure physicals attributes like damping and friction. For humans, dexterous manipulation of objects is a daily task, but it’s still challenging for ...

The keyboard is an important piece of computer hardware which is used to insert all sorts of characters into the system. In a typical keyboard, each button usually corresponds to a single character or symbol, however a combination of key punches are required to produce a desired character. Although, the interpretation of key punches in ...

Researchers develop a new organic molecule that offers the high-performance, longest-lasting organic flow battery so far.  It has tens of thousands of charge-discharge cycles with a degradation rate of 3% per year. Fossil Fuels are polluting our environment at an extremely fast rate. If everything goes at the pace, we won’t be able sustain human civilization in the ...