Metals Tech

Since the mid-1990s, a type of steel column that commonly features slender cross-sectional elements has become more prevalent in buildings along the West Coast of the United States and in other seismically active regions. Although these columns have complied with modern design standards, our understanding of how they would perform during an earthquake has been […]

New green fuels and a goal of increasing performance can make it attractive to 3D print parts of the large cargo ship engines. The large marine engines of the world’s cargo ships are an important focus area in the maritime industry’s efforts to become more sustainable. This also applies to the individual parts of the engine, […]

For electric vehicles (EVs) to become mainstream, they need cost-effective, safer, longer-lasting batteries that won’t explode during use or harm the environment. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology may have found a promising alternative to conventional lithium-ion batteries made from a common material: rubber. Elastomers, or synthetic rubbers, are widely used in consumer products […]

The use of renewable energy systems, such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells, will minimize greenhouse gas emissions and reduce global warming. But use of these systems has to increase—and they require a lot of metal. The World Bank estimates that about three billion metric tons of metals like graphite, lithium and […]

For many years, a bottleneck in technological development has been how to get processors and memories to work faster together. Now, researchers at Lund University in Sweden have presented a new solution integrating a memory cell with a processor, which enables much faster calculations, as they happen in the memory circuit itself. In an article […]

Tired of the color on your car? A new innovation from BMW will let you change it at the touch of a button. At CES, the luxury automaker introduced the iX Flow featuring E Ink, a concept that would allow owners to change the exterior color of their car by pressing a button. BMW said […]

All-solid-state batteries are now one step closer to becoming the powerhouse of next-generation electronics, as researchers from Tokyo Tech, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and Yamagata University introduce a strategy to restore their low electrical resistance. They also explore the underlying reduction mechanism, paving the way for a more fundamental understanding […]

We are currently witnessing an explosion of network traffic. Numerous emerging services and applications, such as cloud services, video streaming platforms and the Internet of Things (IOT), are further increasing the demand for high-capacity communications. Optical communication systems, technologies that transfer information optically using fibers, are the backbone of today’s communication networks of fixed-line, wireless […]

Engineers at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a method for reading several qubits—the smallest unit of quantum data—at the same time. Their method paves the way to a new generation of even more powerful quantum computers. “IBM and Google currently have the world’s most powerful quantum computers,” says Prof. Edoardo Charbon, head […]

Homeowners know that the type of windows in a house contribute greatly to heating and cooling efficiency. And that’s a big deal—maintaining indoor temperatures consumes great amounts of energy and accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the national energy budgets in developed countries. New research from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of […]