An international team of researchers has managed to synthesise and characterise two previously unknown silver nanoclusters of 136 and 374 silver atoms.These diamond-shaped nanoclusters, consisting of a silver core of two to three nanometres and a protecting layer of silver atoms and organic thiol molecules, are the largest whose structure is no...

A three year European research project, which closes today, has launched a set of tools that is said to make computer systems more energy efficient.The EU funded Excess project, led by Chalmers University of Technology, set out to address what it saw as a lack of holistic, integrated approaches to cover all system layers from hardware to user l...

According to researchers at the University of Sheffield, it is now possible for machines to learn how natural or artificial systems work by simply observing them, without being told what to look for. This could mean advances in machines being able to predict, among other things, human behaviour.Dr Roderich Gross from the Department of Automatic...

Fujitsu Semiconductor and Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor have announced that they will begin developing carbon nanotube based memory products using Nantero’s CNT NRAM technology.The licensing agreement between Fujitsu and Nantero will cover the joint development of ultra-fast, ultra-high-density NRAM, non-volatile RAM using carbon nanotubes. B...

Antennas currently in use are mostly based on technology developed 50 years ago, but work undertaken by Aalto University researchers has the potential to allow antennas to enter the digital world.Until now, says the team, antennas support either a broad frequency range or high efficiency, but radiation efficiency has been decreasing because mob...

Researchers from MANA and the Georgia Institute of Technology have jointly developed an anode material for Li-ion rechargeable batteries by forming nanoparticles made of Si-metal composites on metal substrates.The resulting anode material is said to have twice the capacity and a longer life cycle than conventional materials used in Li-ion recha...

Edible, non-toxic batteries could one day power ingestible devices for diagnosing and treating disease and a team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in the United States has reported progress in their development by using melanin pigments, which are naturally found in the body, to develop edible batteries.Melanin is a material...

A prototype radio from the University of Massachusetts Amherst that allows small mobile devices, such as fitness trackers and smartwatches, to take advantage of battery power in larger devices nearby for communication is currently undergoing testing."We take for granted the ability to offload storage and computation from our relatively lim...

Green Hills Software has completed all of the RTCA/DO-178B Level A certification requirements for its Integrity-178 tuMP multicore real-time operating system (RTOS) for Esterline CMC’s next generation of integrated avionics computers and smart displays.Esterline initial deployment of the Integrity-178 tuMP will be on its 3rd generation MF...

Researchers at the University of Warsaw have developed a natural-scale soft caterpillar robot with an opto-mechanical liquid crystalline elastomer (LCE) monolithic design, using LCE technology developed in the LENS Institute in Florence.LCEs are smart materials that can exhibit large shape change under illumination with visible light. It is pos...