Nearing the completion of his master’s degree in computer engineering and computer science at York University in Ontario, Canada, Nariman Farsad was considering pursuing further study elsewhere. But his supervisor, Andrew Eckford, convinced him to stay by suggesting an odd line of research. Stanford researchers led by postdoc Nariman Farsad have built a machine that sends text messages using common chemicals.

Futurists and technology prognosticators have been known to make starry-eyed projections about the so-called IoT. It’s a vision of a world where everything – from implantable biosensors and wearable devices to smart cars and smart home sensors – confers and collaborates wirelessly to make the world a better and more interconnected place. To date, this remains largely a dream.

In 2009, applied physicist Peter Sturrock was visiting the National Solar Observatory in Tucson, Arizona, when the deputy director of the observatory told him he should read a controversial article about radioactive decay. Although the subject was outside Sturrock’s field, it inspired a thought so intriguing that the next day he phoned the author of the study, Purdue University physicist Ephraim Fischbach, to suggest a collaboration.

Solar energy has the potential to provide abundant power, but only if scientists solve two key issues: storing the energy for use at all hours, particularly at night, and making the technology more cost effective. Now an interdisciplinary team at Stanford has made significant strides toward solving the storage issue, demonstrating the most efficient means yet of storing electricity captured from sunlight in the form of chemical bonds.

A new design for solar cells that uses inexpensive, commonly available materials could rival and even outperform conventional cells made of silicon. Stanford and Oxford have created novel solar cells from crystalline perovskite that could outperform existing silicon cells on the market today. This design converts sunlight to electricity at efficiencies of 20%, similar to current technology but at much lower cost.

Try to imagine what the world will look like if human-caused carbon-dioxide emissions aren’t curbed. If your imagination and scientific knowledge can’t take you there, virtual reality can. The Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience, a free science education tool (download here), can take you to the bottom of the sea, then fast-forward to the end of the century, when many coral reefs are predicted to corrode in waters made acidic by t...

Under beams of X-rays, the colors of art become the colours of chemistry. The mysterious blacks, reds and whites of ancient Greek pottery can be read in elements—iron, potassium, calcium and zinc—and art history may be rewritten. That's the power of a growing collaboration between the Cantor Arts Center's Art + Science Learning Lab, art and science faculty, and the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at SLAC Nationa...

Stanford researchers, studying a tiny device that has become increasingly important in disease diagnostics and drug discovery, observed the surprising way it funneled thousands of water droplets into an orderly single file, squeezing them drop by drop, out the tip of the device. Instead of occurring randomly, the droplets followed a predictable pattern.

Stanford bioengineer David Camarillo knows all too well that bicycling is the leading cause of sports- and activity-related concussion and brain injury in the United States. He’s had two concussions as the result of bicycling accidents. While he doesn’t doubt that wearing a helmet is better than no helmet at all, Camarillo thinks that traditional helmets don’t protect riders as well as they could.

A theory developed by the late Stanford professor and Nobel laureate Felix Bloch suggested that a specially structured material that allowed electrons to oscillate in a particular way might be able to conduct terahertz signals. Now, decades after Bloch's theory, Stanford physicists may have developed materials that enable these theorised oscillations, someday allowing for improvements in technologies from solar cells to airport scanners...

Anyone who has taken a photo in a poorly lit restaurant or dim concert venue knows all too well the grainy, fuzzy outcomes of low-light imaging. Scientists trying to take images of biological specimens encounter the same issue because they tend to work in low light to avoid damaging delicate samples. The resulting grainy images can make it hard to distinguish the intricate proteins and internal structures they are trying to study.

It does not take an infinite number of monkeys to type a passage of Shakespeare. Instead, it takes a single monkey equipped with brain-sensing technology – and a cheat sheet. A team led by electrical engineer Krishna Shenoy developed technology that detects brain signals to move a cursor. Animals trained to copy text using the technology were able to type at a rate of up to 12 words per minute.

The spinning rainbow surface of a soap bubble is more than mesmerising – it’s a lesson in fluid mechanics. Better understanding of these hypnotic flows could bring improvements in many areas, from longer lasting beer foam to life-saving lung treatments. The whirling on the surface of bubbles is caused in part by the Marangoni effect. This phenomenon occurs when molecules called surfactants move from areas of low surface tension t...

Stanford engineers have developed a low-cost, plastic-based textile that, if woven into clothing, could cool your body far more efficiently than is possible with the natural or synthetic fabrics in clothes we wear today. Describing their work in Science, the researchers suggest that this new family of fabrics could become the basis for garments that keep people cool in hot climates without air conditioning.

  A panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in AI might affect life in a typical North American city – in areas as diverse as transportation, health care and education ­– and to spur discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair and beneficial development of these rapidly emerging technologies.

One of the biggest challenges in providing relief to people living in poverty is locating them. The availability of accurate and reliable information on the location of impoverished zones is surprisingly lacking for much of the world, particularly on the African continent. Aid groups and other international organisations often fill in the gaps with door-to-door surveys, but these can be expensive and time-consuming to conduct.

Computers can be trained to be more accurate than pathologists in assessing slides of lung cancer tissues, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The researchers found that a machine-learning approach to identifying critical disease-related features accurately differentiated between two types of lung cancers and predicted patient survival times better than the standard approach of pathologists clas...

A 3D printing technique being developed at Stanford could one day allow scientists to study rocks from afar, without needing to have actual samples in hand. By combining two techniques—remote 3D imaging and 3D printing—scientists could create physical models of digitally scanned rocks that are either too delicate to handle or too difficult to obtain in person, such as rocks from the moon or Mars.

Silicon memory chips come in two broad types: volatile memory, such as computer RAM that loses data when the power is turned off, and nonvolatile flash technologies that store information even after we shut off our smartphones. In general, volatile memory is much faster than nonvolatile storage, so engineers often balance speed and retention when picking the best memory for the task. That's why slower flash is used for permanent storage.

  Better batteries that charge quickly and last a long time are a brass ring for engineers. But despite decades of research and innovation, a fundamental understanding of exactly how batteries work at the smallest of scales has remained elusive.