Researchers at Stanford and IBM Research report the development of chemical approaches that could efficiently and inexpensively generate biodegradable plastics suitable for making an array of items as diverse as forks, medical devices and fabrics. The study is published in the current issue of Nature Chemistry. As with many chemical reactions, creating biodegradable polyesters requires the assistance of a catalyst – a special clas...

  Experiments conducted under the leadership of a Stanford University School of Medicine investigator have succeeded, for the first time, in restoring multiple key aspects of vision in mammals.

  The numbers of antibiotic-resistant bacteria are increasing globally, threatening human health. An undergraduate entrepreneurship program run by Stanford ChEM-H is helping students design and test drugs to combat the resistant bacteria.

  Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have made an important breakthrough in their ongoing efforts to develop a diagnostic test that can tell health-care providers whether a patient has a bacterial infection and will benefit from antibiotics. The study was published in Science Translational Medicine.

A paper published in the journal Nature Materials reshapes our understanding of the materials in important protective layers. In the study, Stanford's Reinhold Dauskardt, a professor of materials science and engineering, and doctoral candidate Joseph Burg reveal that those glassy materials respond very differently to compression than they do to the tension of bending and stretching.

Like many autistic children, Julian Brown has trouble reading emotions in people's faces, one of the challenging conditions of the neurological disorder. Now the 10-year-old San Jose boy is getting help from an experimental device that records and analyses faces in real time and alerts him to the emotions they're expressing. The facial recognition software was developed at Stanford University and runs on Google Glass, a computerised hea...

  A Stanford University research lab has developed technologies to tackle two of the world’s biggest energy challenges – clean fuel for transportation and grid-scale energy storage. The researchers described their findings in two studies published this month in the journals Science Advances and Nature Communications.

In order for robots to circulate on sidewalks and mingle with humans in other crowded places, they’ll have to understand the unwritten rules of pedestrian behaviour. Stanford researchers have created a short, non-humanoid prototype of a moving, self-navigating machine. The robot is nicknamed “Jackrabbot” – after the jackrabbits often seen darting across the Stanford campus.

There’s a good reason your doctor asks for a urine sample at your annual checkup. A simple, colour-changing paper test, dipped into the specimen, can measure levels of glucose, blood, protein and other chemicals, which in turn can indicate evidence of kidney disease, diabetes, urinary tract infections and even signs of bladder cancer.

When David Lentink watches a pigeon dart around a building and land perfectly in its roost, however, he sees the future of robotic flight. Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, has been studying birds in flight for years, with an eye toward applying the tricks birds use to navigate changing conditions in the real world to design better aerial robots.

Cutting-edge facilities at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have allowed researchers like Aaron Lindenberg to visualise properties of nanoscale materials at ultrafast time scales. In one experiment, a team led by Lindenberg showed atoms shifting in trillionths of a second to produce a wrinkle in a 3-atom-thick sample of a material that might someday be used in flexible electronics.

The key to unlocking cleaner energy might be in our DNA, according to a new study by Stanford scientists. By combining synthetic DNA with microscopic particles, Yuran Zhang and a team of geothermal energy researchers hope to tap into the widely available but often overlooked cleaner energy source all over the world. Geothermal energy is the heat of the earth, and geothermal power is generated by extracting that heat and converting it to electrici...

Solar cells made of artificial crystalline structures called perovskites have shown great promise in recent years. Now Stanford University scientists have found that applying pressure can change the properties of these inexpensive materials and how they respond to light. "Our results suggest that we can increase the voltages of perovskite solar cells by applying external pressure," said Hemamala Karunadasa, an assistant professor of chemistry at ...

When contact lenses work really well, you forget they are on your eyes. You might not feel the same at the end of a long day staring at a computer screen. After too many hours of wear, the lenses and your eyes dry out, causing irritation that might outweigh the convenience of contacts. Stanford researchers hope to alleviate this pain by both advancing the understanding of how natural tears keep our eyes comfortable, and developing a machine for d...

Roboticists are as focused on small robots that can function and go where the big robots cannot. It's all about scale at the Biomimetics and Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory at Stanford. They are working on robots that live at the boundary of airborne and surface locomotion. Smaller robots are robust in dealing with impacts, more capable of rapid orientation changes, and can achieve higher adhesive forces relative to their size.

Scientists have many tools at their disposal for looking at preserved tissue under a microscope in incredible detail, or peering into the living body at lower resolution. What they haven't had is a way to do both: create a three-dimensional real-time image of individual cells or even molecules in a living animal. Now, Stanford scientists have provided the first glimpse under the skin of a living animal, showing intricate real-time details in thre...

A middle-aged white man sees himself as a young black woman being taunted by a racist. An Israeli grandmother glimpses herself as a Palestinian teen. A star athlete experiences what life would be like in a wheelchair. These are not plots of dystopian movies. They are experiences that take place in VR, which technologists believe will be the next major platform for everything from gaming to social interaction and perhaps even global diplomacy.

People have thrived deep within the Amazon rainforest for hundreds of years without contact with the outside world. The constant encroachment of modern civilisation, however, is putting the long-term sustainability of these people, and the ecosystems they inhabit, at risk. Now a team of Stanford researchers has developed a computer model that can help understand the ways that activities such as clear-cutting and welfare programs might impact the ...

A common theme in medicine is that detecting a disease early on can lead to more effective treatments. This relies partly on luck that the patient gets screened at the right time, but more important is that the testing techniques are sensitive enough to register the minuscule hints that diseases leave in the blood stream.

Cell phones, laptops, and other electronic devices that have rechargeable batteries use lithium ion batteries. Lithium batteries have a high energy density. Fewer cells are needed to power a device, which allows for a lighter device that is more portable. However, lithium batteries are not as powerful or as long-lasting as they could be. For one, lithium battery cells tend to form dendrites, lithium metal deposits that from on the lithium electro...