Search results for "sphere"

Steve Rogerson talks to some of the companies preparing for September’s Low Carbon Vehicle Event.Once an essential part of growing up, learning to drive, passing your driving test and going out on the road in either your own or more likely your parents’ car, was a rite of passage for many an adolescent. Today, that is changing. For example, the USA, the flag bearer for car ownership, is seeing a fall in the number of teenage drivers. ...

Northern China's roadsides are peppered with deciduous phoenix trees, producing an abundance of fallen leaves in autumn. These leaves are generally burned in the colder season, exacerbating the country's air pollution problem. Investigators in Shandong, China, recently discovered a new method to convert this organic waste matter into a porous carbon material that can be used to produce high-tech electronics. The advance is reported in the Journal...

Engineers in Japan have developed a Virtual Reality (VR) ‘space ride’ in which viewers feel as if they are flying through the air inside a giant glass ball.Unlike conventional VR systems, the ‘8K:VR Ride’ - which resembles a cross between a theme park ride and a miniature IMAX theatre - does not require users to wear any headgear.

In recent years, perovskites have taken the solar cell industry by storm. They are cheap, easy to produce and very flexible in their applications. Their efficiency at converting light into electricity has grown faster than that of any other material – from under 4%in 2009 to over 20%in 2017 – and some experts believe that perovskites could eventually outperform the most common solar cell material, silicon. But despite their popularity...

The fifth annual iteration of Domo's informative visual report that provides insight into consumers' online behaviour has been released;'Data Never Sleeps 5.0'. The infographic details how much data is being generated on the internet every minute across popular applications and platforms, including Snapchat, Instagram, Amazon, Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and more. Domo first introduced the 'Data Never Sleeps' project in 2013, as a snapshot into the...

Water droplets float in a hot pan because of the so-called Leidenfrost effect. Now, physicists have discovered a variation: the elastic Leidenfrost effect. It explains why hydrogel balls jump around on a hot plate making high-pitched sounds. They have published the results of their study inNature Physics.Most of the time, research arises through the gradual advancement of science.

When it comes to cyber attacks, the focus is usually on devices that communicate with the internet via fixed networks. Mobile users, however, are at no less risk - a fact that is becoming more critical with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT). A new test solution now covers the network activities of wireless devices, providing important information about security gaps.

A tiny sphere and a laser beam inside of which it hovers as if by magic: with these simple ingredients Martin Frimmer and co-workers at the Photonics Laboratory of ETHZurich have developed a highly sensitive sensor. In the future this device is expected to measure, amongst other things, extremely weak forces or electric fields very precisely. Now the researchers have taken a major step in that direction, as they write in a recently published scie...

In a 1999 paper, Erik Demaine — now an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, but then an 18-year-old PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada — described an algorithm that could determine how to fold a piece of paper into any conceivable 3Dshape.It was a milestone paper in the field of computational origami, but the algorithm didn’t yield very practical folding patterns.

Stanford researchers have for the first time captured the freezing of water, molecule-by-molecule, into a strange, dense form called ice VII (“ice seven”), found naturally in otherworldly environments, such as when icy planetary bodies collide.In addition to helping scientists better understand those remote worlds, the findings – published inPhysical Review Letters– could reveal how water and other substances undergo trans...