At Disney World's Magic Kingdom, you're meant to lose yourself in the illusion. What you're not meant to think about is what happens after the park closes: the cranes, mechanics, overnight software updates, and engineering operations required to erase every trace of maintenance before sunrise.

But behind every seamless morning open lies a question worth asking: how does Disney keep rides that have been running for more than 50 years feeling like they've always been here — and always will be?

Taylor McLaughlin joined Disney in 2013 as a mechanical engineer, supporting projects across all four parks before helping launch Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance at Hollywood Studios. Today, as Senior Manager of Engineering Services at Magic Kingdom, she oversees engineering operations for Fantasyland and Tomorrowland Speedway — a portfolio covering some of the park's oldest and most technically demanding attractions. Her team of roughly 75 cast members works primarily between 11 PM and 6 AM.

On a rare behind-the-scenes tour Disney granted exclusively to TechRadar, McLaughlin walked me through several attractions mid-third-shift — past the safety lockout boards at Mad Tea Party, through the Speedway garage, and deep into the original back-of-show building behind "It's a Small World." Her team was already at work when we arrived.

'I came by at 6 AM and everything was cleared out'

The first stop is Mad Tea Party, and McLaughlin opens with a detail that immediately reframes the ride. There was a crane here twenty-four hours earlier.

Three flatbed trucks full of cribbing, a chain threaded down through a small hatch in the attraction's roof — invisible to guests — and a team on third shift using it to lift one of the spinning turntables clean off the floor to access the drive components and bearings underneath. By 6 AM, the crane was gone, the trucks were gone, and the ride was ready to open.

"I'm super proud of my team," McLaughlin says. "You would have no idea."

Unlike newer attractions with purpose-built maintenance access, legacy rides like Tea Cups sit directly in guest-facing space. Every crane, heavy lift, and bearing replacement is planned weeks in advance and executed overnight.

Tonight there's no crane, but the work hasn't stopped. Shawn, a foreman who has worked on the attraction for three years, has the hatch open while his team moves through nightly adjustments and inspections ahead of a 7 AM open. Watching them work, the scale of what sits beneath the ride's cheerful surface is surprising.

Walking onto the powered-down platform after hours completely resets your understanding of the attraction. Guests see spinning cups and pastel colors. What's actually here is a serious piece of industrial machinery: a giant exposed turntable, drive systems, and layered rotating platforms engineered to put three simultaneous axes of spin on every cup in the ride.

Every person entering follows a protocol called RMP: Ride Motion Protection. Power is formally eliminated, each team member applies their own physical lock to the E-stop, and registers their ID on a dedicated board before anyone moves. McLaughlin holds out a lock and asks for my driver's license. I hand it over. She slots it into the sleeve — your physical proof that you're inside, and that nothing moves until you're out.

The control console reinforces the ride's age. Where a newer attraction like Tron Lightcycle / Run relies on digital diagnostics, Tea Cups still uses physical indicator lights and a laminated note explaining what each blinking pattern means.

Technology has still been layered in carefully. Vibration sensors track bearing and drive-component trends over time, while gearbox oil testing helps identify developing failures before they become major problems. The team has also added instrumentation that requires an engineer to physically ride in a tea cup with an accelerometer to capture motion data during testing cycles.

"If I start seeing higher vibration, I can spot early changes and proactively plan [maintenance ahead of time]," McLaughlin says.

Auto-lubricators beneath the turntable systems close another gap. Instead of requiring someone to work underneath the ride while systems are moving, lubrication now happens automatically while extending component life at the same time.

"There are two types of maintenance," McLaughlin says. "You're either on the preventive side or the corrective side. The more we can be proactive and not reactive — that's our number one goal."

Redundancy as a system

The real engineering trick at Disney isn't eliminating failures entirely. It's designing systems where guests never notice them.

Space Mountain runs two independent track systems. Dumbo at Storybook Circus operates as two separate ride systems side by side, each with its own motors, gearboxes, and maintenance schedules. Soarin' at EPCOT added a third theater, partly so one could be taken offline without shutting down the experience completely.

"There are times things happen," McLaughlin says. "And still being able to bring guests through the experience, even at half capacity, is way better than zero."

Operators form another layer of the system. Every unusual sound, smell, or vibration triggers an immediate stop and inspection. Most turn out to be minor. McLaughlin recalls a recent guest reporting a possible mechanical issue on Seven Dwarfs Mine Train that ultimately turned out to be an intentional audio effect built into the ride.

The most mechanical ride in the park

Tomorrowland Speedway sits at the opposite end of the technology spectrum. No onboard computers. No software updates. Just gasoline engines, mechanical systems, and a working garage hidden inside a theme park.

"It's mechanically as basic as it gets," McLaughlin says. "True engines in these cars."

Fuel deliveries still feed tanks buried beneath the attraction. Some vehicles in the current fleet were transferred from Tokyo Disneyland after that park retired its version of the ride, with mechanics adapting the imported cars into the existing system.

The garage tells the story immediately: lifts, tool chests, parts racks, and vehicles in various states of repair. It feels exactly like what it is — a functioning automotive shop that happens to sit inside Magic Kingdom.

Even here, the improvement cycle hasn't stopped. After hood linkage failures occasionally caused hoods to fall unexpectedly during maintenance checks, the team retrofitted the fleet with pneumatic hood supports to eliminate the hazard.

The technology level changes. The engineering philosophy does not.

Original engineering, still running

Walking into the back-of-show building behind "It's a Small World" feels like stepping into another era of Disney engineering entirely — and another world most guests don't know exists.

This is an original structure from 1971, still operating daily. Boats line the space, with the infrastructure overhead to lift and move them as needed. Tool carts and workbenches run along the walls. In the middle of all of it, three engineers are mid-shift, working across the attraction's more than 350 animated figures. It's an active workshop — one that happens to be keeping a 54-year-old attraction show-ready for tomorrow morning.

The team still works from the original manuals. During our visit, one figure's arm had been removed, sent out for welding, returned, and was already being prepared for reinstallation — all within the same shift. Joe Ignell, a show technician who has spent years working on the attraction, is one of the engineers here tonight. The expertise in this room exists through repetition and experience as much as documentation.

When the original documentation doesn't capture how a figure is supposed to move, the team turns to whatever historical footage exists — hunting down decades-old park videos online to verify the reference before making adjustments. These are hydraulic animatronics built with technology that was cutting-edge in the early 1970s and still running today. Disney Imagineering teams inspect the attraction regularly, grading show quality and comparing figure movement against the original design intent.

"So much of Fantasyland is about relying on your gut, your experience with this ride," McLaughlin says. "That is a skill set. You have to have real expertise and experience in your field to be successful in these attractions."

Mine Train and the new standard

Seven Dwarfs Mine Train is where Disney's modern maintenance philosophy becomes most visible.

When the attraction opened, many software fault conditions defaulted to option one: stop the ride and evacuate guests. Over time, McLaughlin's team has worked with sustaining engineers to rewrite portions of that logic, allowing the ride to recover from more minor issues without triggering lengthy downtime.

The system now produces predictive alerts tied to ride performance, surfacing developing issues before they become major failures. When faults do occur, engineers can often remotely assess conditions and restore operation faster than before.

"Sometimes it's not just about how you prevent the downtime from occurring," McLaughlin says. "It's also: okay, the downtime occurred — how do we make this more recoverable? How do we make this quicker?"

At the time of our visit, the team was midway through a multi-night testing cycle — uploading updated PLC logic overnight, running trains, and completing regular nightly maintenance inside the same narrow operating window. Every night, whether there's a software update or not, that cycle runs. A two-hour closure on Mine Train impacts thousands of guests. Reducing both the frequency and duration of those events becomes its own form of capacity gain.

The park comes alive

Just before 7 AM, the transition happens quickly.

The park-wide audio system comes online with the morning soundtrack. Tron's LED canopy ignites across the skyline. A tractor-trailer disappears backstage. Then the intercom fires:

"All lands must be clear of all vehicles and equipment. Show-ready at 6:45 AM."

Within minutes, the last maintenance vehicles are gone. The Tea Cups hatch is sealed. Overnight software updates are complete. Shawn's crew has handed off to operations. Joe and his team have their animatronic back in place.

The only evidence of the night's work is a set of attractions operating exactly as they should — which is to say, no evidence at all.

"You think third shift is going to be scary and quiet," McLaughlin says. "There's always painting, cleaning, horticulture, engineers — everywhere."

Technology in service of the ride

What a night inside Magic Kingdom's engineering operation makes clear is that Disney's maintenance strategy isn't about adding technology everywhere possible. It's about identifying where technology meaningfully improves reliability, safety, or recoverability, without introducing unnecessary complexity.

At Mine Train, software updates and predictive systems materially reduced downtime. At Tea Cups, targeted sensors and auto-lubrication modernized the ride without compromising the simplicity that has kept it running for decades. At Speedway, a pneumatic hood support solved a safety problem without fundamentally changing the attraction.

"We've been entrusted to keep something so important and special going," McLaughlin says. "The investment to keep adding safety features, to improve the guest experience — that doesn't stop because the ride has been here for 50 years."

What becomes clear overnight at Magic Kingdom is that the magic of a Disney park isn't only built into the new. A lot of it is rebuilt, quietly, every single night.

The Mad Tea Party, "It's a Small World," Tomorrowland Speedway, and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train are open daily at Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and you read a deep dive into the most technologically advanced parade at that park here.

• British engineering company IMI plc notifies London Stock Exchange of a recent cyberattack
• The company did not share the details, but this seems to have been a data breach

Top British engineering company IMI has confirmed suffering a cyberattack, filing a new report with the London Stock Exchange, notifying the securities exchange of “unauthorized access”.

“IMI is currently responding to a cyber security incident involving unauthorized access to the Company's systems,” the filing reads. “As soon as IMI became aware of the unauthorized access, the company engaged external cyber security experts to investigate and contain the incident.”

Other than that, the company did not share any details. It said it was taking “necessary steps” to comply with regulatory obligations, and that it will provide an update “when appropriate”.

Data breach

When reached out by TechCrunch, the company did not want to discuss the matter further, so we don’t know the nature of the attack, who the miscreants are, or how they managed to break into IMI’s infrastructure.

However the publication did find out, from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office, that the company provided it with a data breach report, so it’s safe to assume that at least some company data was stolen.

The ICO is currently “assessing the information provided,” it was said.

IMI was founded in 1862 as Imperial Metal Industries. Its core business areas include precision engineering (advanced motion and fluid control solutions for industrial automation), critical engineering (valves and actuators for the energy and power industries), and hydronic engineering (heating, cooling, and climate control solutions for buildings).

The company serves sectors like oil and gas, pharmaceuticals, power generation, and transportation. In fiscal 2023, the company reported $398 million in profits before tax, up 6% compared to the year before.

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A little-known quirk of the human eye might pave the way for better self-driving car cameras and even more effective smartphone photography.

As you're reading this, your eyes are in most cases slowly scanning from left to right but even when not reading or looking at a fixed object your eyes are constantly on the move and this, it turns out, is the key to the quality of human vision and how robots, self-driving cars, and maybe even smartphones could see more clearly.

A team of University of Maryland researchers created a camera that mimics human eye movements. Called the Artificial Microsaccade-Enhanced Event Camera (AMI-EV), it uses a rotating round wedge prism (round, but one face of the prism is sharply angled) rotating in front of an event camera, in this case, an Intel RealSense D435 camera, to move the images around.

Even though the movements are small, they're meant to mimic the saccades of the human eye. Saccades describe three different levels of movement the eye makes – Rapid, small tremors, slower eye drift, and microsaccades, which happen multiple times per second and are small enough to be imperceptible to the human eye. 

This last movement may help us see more clearly, especially moving objects where our eye shifts to put the image against the best part of our retina, replacing blurs with shape and color. 

With the understanding of how these micro-movements help human perception, the team equipped its camera with a rotating prism.

According to the paper's abstract, "Inspired by microsaccades, we designed an event-based perception system capable of simultaneously maintaining low reaction time and stable texture. In this design, a rotating wedge prism was mounted in front of the aperture of an event camera to redirect light and trigger events."

Researchers paired the hardware solution with software that could compensate for the movement and combine captured images for a stable and clear image.

According to a report in Science Daily, the experiments were so successful that AMI EV-equipped cameras detected everything from quickly moving objects to the human pulse. That's some precise vision.

Making robotic eyes see more like humans offers the potential of not only robots that can share our vision skills but, for instance, self-driving cars that could finally discern between people and other objects. There is already evidence that self-driving cars struggle to identify some humans. A self-driving Tesla equipped with an AMI-EV camera might be able to tell the difference between a bag blowing by and a child running into the street. 

Equipped with AMI EV cameras, mixed-reality headsets, which use cameras to combine real and virtual worlds, might do a better job combining them for a more realistic experience.

"...it has many applications that much of the general public already interacts with, like autonomous driving systems or even smartphone cameras. We believe that our novel camera system is paving the way for more advanced and capable systems to come.," Yiannis Aloimonos, a professor of computer science at UMD and the study's co-author, told Science Daily.

These are early days, and the hardware looks more like something you'd put in an engine than the ultra-tiny and thin camera you might need for the best smartphone. 

Still, the realization that something we can't see happening is responsible for what we can see and how that small but critical vision capability can be replicated in robotic cameras is a significant step on the path to a future where robots match human visual perception.

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Sony and Siemens have unveiled a mixed reality headset designed for the industrial metaverse at CES 2024.

The two tech giants have teamed up to develop a headset for engineering and design (among other things) set to be released later this year.

The mixed reality headset is designed for professionals looking to expand their productivity and problem solving within the industrial metaverse.

“Solve real world problems”

Siemens CEO Dr. Roland Busch stated that the headset will be used within the industrial metaverse, which he explains as “an immersive space where people and AI can collaborate in real time to solve real world problems.”

The headset will feature 4K OLED microdisplays and is controlled using a pair of unusual controls. One is a more traditional looking VR controller, but the other is worn on one finger. 

At CES 2024 a number of the headset’s use cases were demonstrated, with particular attention being drawn to the use of digital twins - a highly detailed virtual recreation of a product or design - which can help companies keep production costs down by prototyping their designs in the metaverse.

The mixed reality headset is designed to use Siemens’ Xcelerator digital transformation software, which combines IOT hardware with an open ecosystem of tech companies and industrial partners allowing enhanced collaboration and expert design feedback.

The capabilities and design of this headset certainly targets a professional demographic, and may be a viable alternative for those with their eye on the Apple Vision Pro.

Sony’s executive deputy president and officer in charge of technology and incubation, Yoshinori Matsumoto, stated, “At Sony, we are passionate about empowering creators with cutting-edge technologies, and in the field of spatial content creation, we have thrived in innovating the way they work by utilizing our proprietary motion and display technologies.”

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Google has launched passkey support for Workspace and Google Cloud accounts, offering enterprises a passwordless way for workers to login.

At the start of this month, the company added passkey support for Google Accounts, letting individual users log in without a master password at all. It's continued push for the passwordless technology reflects the tech giant's confidence in this brave new world of credential security.

Starting today, Google says that more than 9 millions organizations will be able to take advantage of the cutting-edge tech, aimed at significantly reducing security risks whilst at the same time being much more convenient.

Phishing resistant

Passkeys make use of two cryptographic keys - a public and a private. The public one is stored by the service you are trying to access, whilst the private key is stored on your device. 

No one knows what this key is - not even you - which is why it is claimed to be phishing resistant. When you initiate a login, the two keys combine to give you access. All that is needed for authentication is whatever method you use to lock your device, such as a PIN, fingerprint scan or facial recognition.

Phishing attacks continue to rise and even if you use the best password manager and the strongest passwords courtesy of the best password generators, it is still possible that slip-ups, user error, malware and the like may lead to your credentials becoming compromised.

Google Workspace managers Jeroen Kemperman and Shruti Kulkarni cite some worrying research that spells clear the magnitude of the problem. For instance, Over 60% of data breaches in 2021 involved stolen credentials or phishing; Data breaches caused by phishing cost organizations $4.91 million on average in 2022; and Phishing attacks grew 61% in 2022, reaching 255 million in a six-month period.

Google claims it has been at the forefront of ushering in a new era of credential security, with technology such as AI being used to automate defenses, as well as being a board-level member of the FIDO alliance - the open-industry association that sets the standards for passwordless solutions. The board also features the other major players in the tech world: Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft.

Google claims it is now the first major public cloud provider to bring this technology to business customers, from small and large enterprises to schools and governments. Passwords can still be used, but now there is an easier way to log in; according to Google's own data, passkeys are twice as fast as passwords and quadruple less error prone. 

The use of passkeys with Google Workspace will be rolled out over the next few weeks, with controls for admins also coming to allow users within the organization to skip passwords altogether or use them merely as a method of two-factor authentication in conjunction with a password. 

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Scientists and engineers at the Lawrence Livermoore National Laboratory say they successfully created burning plasma in a laboratory that briefly sustained itself by the heat of its own nuclear fusion reactions – a key milestone on the road to harnessing functional fusion energy.

The researchers used the world's most energetic laser at the lab's National Ignition Facility (NIF) to heat up a BB-sized hydrogen isotope to many times the temperature at the very core of the Sun. This created the pressure necessary to trigger the fusion process in the hydrogen, which then heated the material of its own accord by a significant fraction of a megajoule without the aid of other sources of heat.

The researchers unveiled their work in an article in this week's Nature, penned by LLNL physicist Alex Zylstra and Omar Hurricane.

"A burning plasma is one in which the fusion reactions heat the fuel more than the initial heating we did to get the burn started," Zylstra explained to TechRadar. "We first produced this state in experiments conducted between November 2020 and February 2021, as reported in this paper; these experiments produced up to 0.17 megajoules of fusion energy."

The end goal of this work, and the reason for the NIF site itself, is to create a fusion reaction strong enough to become self-sustaining. It requires an enormous amount of outside energy to induce fusion, where two hydrogens atoms are smooshed together, releasing vast amounts of energy. And in order for it to truly work as a fuel, fusion needs to release more energy than was used to trigger the initial fusion spark. 

Once the spark is lit, every fusion reaction produces enough energy to keep the process going, inducing fusion in neighboring hydrogen atoms which release energy as well in an exponentially growing fashion.

This self-sustaining heat generated by the burning plasma actually enabled LLNL engineers to produce a record breaking energy output last August when LLNL's National Ignition Facility generated 10 quadrillion watts of energy from a fusion experiment.

That 0.17-megajoule burst isn't even 10% of what is needed to ignite sustained nuclear fusion, but it's 10% more energy than LLNL lasers had to begin with.

"This is important because it means that we can now leverage the fusion’s self-heating to substantially increase the amount of energy generated with further improvements, and this was what was shown on a subsequent experiment in August 2021 that produced 1.3 megajoules of energy," Zylstra told us. "Ignition is a milestone that is harder than a burning plasma, it is when the fusion self-heating can overpower physical mechanisms that cause the fuel to lose energy."

Meanwhile, all this is done without leaving behind any radioactive waste. In fact, the only byproduct of this process is helium, which is actually in short supply globally -- so even the byproduct of this process is valuable.

Analysis: Okay, but when are we getting fusion reactors?

Despite the mind-blowing achievement and a decade or more of research at NIF, it will take a while before nuclear fusion starts powering the world.

"A scientific demonstration of fusion ignition is perhaps comparable to the Wright brother’s plane," Zylstra told TechRadar. "But then it's still very challenging to go from that accomplishment to a modern jet airplane that you can buy tickets for a transcontinental flight on."

Right now, researchers are more in the proof-of-concept phase of things and are attempting to determine if useful nuclear fusion is even possible given the state of our technology. 

Once all of these steps have been verified, it will be up to other scientists and engineers to figure out how best to harness this new technology. But if it works, this research will change our lives -- and that's science fact, not fiction.

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Even in our increasingly digital world, not all businesses have turned to the cloud which is why Microsoft is preparing to ramp up its efforts to build products designed for specific industries.

At a recent virtual event put on by Bloomberg, EVP of business development at Microsoft, Christopher Young said that “we'll see industries that were traditionally slow movers, slow adopters of technology do more”.

The software giant plans to focus its attention on industries such as architecture and engineering which it believes have fallen behind when it comes to cloud modernization.

Microsoft isn't the only cloud computing provider pursuing this strategy as Google Cloud has released new industry-specific applications and Oracle has a wide range of programs for professionals across several industries ranging from healthcare to human resources.

Industry-specific clouds and digital twins

Back in October, Microsoft announced the launch of three new industry-specific cloud offerings for Azure in the form of Microsoft Cloud for Financial Services, Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing and Microsoft Cloud for Nonprofit.

In addition to its Microsoft Cloud for Manufacturing, one of the other ways that the company plans to expand its presence in the industry is through its Digital Twins technology. Microsoft provided details on Azure Digital Twins in a support document, saying:

“Azure Digital Twins is a platform as a service (PaaS) offering that enables the creation of twin graphs based on digital models of entire environments, which could be buildings, factories, farms, energy networks, railways, stadiums, and more—even entire cities. These digital models can be used to gain insights that drive better products, optimized operations, reduced costs, and breakthrough customer experiences.”

With Digital Twins, engineers, designers and other professionals will be able to collaborate in real-time on simulated models. For instance, a business could use the technology to analyze virtual representations of machines in one of its factories while architecture firms could use it to scrutinize models of building in other cities or even countries.

We'll likely hear more from Microsoft on its efforts to win over cloud-skeptics next year as its industry-specific cloud services begin rolling out.

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Facebook is expanding its presence in the UK with a new engineering center and the social network has announced that it will create 500 new tech jobs in London by the end of 2019.

Of these new jobs, 100 will be dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI) which the company plans to use to create systems to better detect and remove malicious content, fake accounts and other harmful behavior on its platform.

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Facebook's vice president EMEA Nicola Mendelsohn explained how the new hires will work to improve safety on the social network, saying:

“Safety is our top priority at Facebook, and over the last two years we’ve substantially increased our investment in this area. These hundreds of new jobs demonstrate not only our commitment to the U.K. but also our determination to do everything we can to keep Facebook safe and secure."

London tech scene

Facebook expects to employ over 3,000 people in the capital by the end of the year across its two existing sites as well as at its new engineering center in Soho.

According to the social media giant, London is home to its largest engineering center outside of the US and it plans to have 1,800 people employed in technology and engineering by the end of the year.

The mayor of London Sadiq Khan praised the news, saying:

"This investment is great news for the capital and is further proof that London is open to talent and to new investment in our thriving tech sector. I’ve been calling for stronger action by businesses and government to tackle malicious and harmful content, so it’s good to see Facebook taking further steps to protect its users." 

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Metamaterials is one of the newest, most dynamic and exciting areas of science.  They enable scientists to change the natural properties of materials, pushing the boundaries of possibility to achieve what has never been done before. Dr Irina Khromova is one of the foremost experts on metamaterials and she discusses how metamaterials could be used now and in the future. 

Metamaterials first came into public consciousness through the concept of invisibility cloaking – and while making objects invisible using metamaterials is certainly not the only or most practical application for the science, there are many potential commercial benefits to explore.  

Scientists first started to look at practical uses for metamaterials in the late 20th century. This new branch of science involves changing the behaviour of waves, for example sound or light, by making them interact with purposefully designed and artificially-built structures. For the waves in question,  such a structure looks and feels like a material with unusual properties not found in conventional materials.   

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How metamaterials are being used today

Once appearing to defy the laws of physics, metamaterials science is now opening up numerous possibilities and challenging the thinking around the design and capabilities of different technologies. Using metamaterials can even bring improvements or efficiencies to existing technology by introducing features that have not been achievable before.

According to Grand View Research, the global metamaterials market will be worth $1.35 billion USD by 2025.  Already used in industries such as aerospace and defence, metamaterials will become widely adopted across many vertical industries including construction, consumer electronics, medical and energy. The report projects that the use of metamaterials in consumer electronics will grow at a CAGR of 21% from 2017 to 2025, and attributes the opportunities for product enhancement as a key reason for this.

Many people were first exposed to metamaterials through the concept of invisibility cloaking, with media outlets jumping on the idea that metamaterials could be responsible for a Harry Potter type invisibility cloak. Although this is more associated with the world of wizardry, the science behind using metamaterials to create cloaking is real. 

One of the newest, most commercially successful applications of metamaterials is to create noise reduction barriers, with a view to using them on motorways and major roads. Traditionally, noise barriers made of conventional materials fail to block low-frequency sounds and degrade with time as moisture builds up inside them.  Inevitably, with so much new urban development and the continued growth of transport infrastructure, there will be increasing demand for materials that reduce or cut out the sound of road and air traffic. Metamaterials-based solutions promise to be much more robust and longer lasting, offering significant opportunity in this area of engineering. 

Future uses of metamaterials

Scientists are also making significant progress into honing the properties of materials to create protective shields against radiation and seismic activity. Barriers made of metamaterials would absorb or deflect seismic waves, thus reducing the risks and impact posed by earthquakes. This works very differently from traditional materials so it is entirely possible that future cities could be built using materials that offer more robust protection against earthquakes and other natural disasters than ever before.    

Apart from shielding and absorbing waves, metamaterials can also help us tap off some of the energy these waves carry. Metamaterials can be designed to trap, convert and recycle this energy. With prospective application in advanced solar batteries and residual radio-noise harvesting, metamaterials are in the spotlight of breakthrough greener technologies.

With the ability to control the propagation of waves, metamaterials are also enabling scientists to take power and data transfer to the next level. Specific types of waves, such as magneto-inductive waves, existing in the metamaterial, can carry power in a controlled manner. This phenomenon has paved the way for scientists to significantly expand wireless charging for mobile phones and other electronic devices. For an individual, a metamaterials-based charger will mean hassle-free charging on large surfaces – one can just drop a device onto the charging surface without the need to worry about alignment. This is a huge step towards making wireless power as ubiquitous and convenient as modern data connectivity.

Including many aspects of physics and engineering, metamaterials offer new possibilities for developing technologies for smart cities, houses and transport and could help reduce costs, increase security and safety and lessen environmental impact all in one go. In addition, the design of future medical and health technologies could employ metamaterials to help enhance product features, particularly where personal data security is paramount or where very high-quality imaging is needed.

Metamaterials have opened up a new treasure chest of possibilities for safer, greener and more effective and efficient technologies. If metamaterials technologies keep up the pace, metamaterials will be used extensively yet unobtrusively in our daily lives. Undoubtedly, these are exciting times for metamaterials and the next decade will carve out their place in the world of technology and engineering.

Dr. Irina Khromova, Head of Science and Technology at Metaboards 

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Those of you who own a smartwatch will be familiar with a major drawback of any wearable device that has a smaller screen than a smartphone – text input is a real pain.

But a team of wearable computing engineers at Georgia Tech has developed what looks like a potential solution. It's a smart ring that lets you trace letters and numbers with your thumb, allowing easy, silent text input on even the tiniest screens.

“A ring augments the fingers in a way that is fairly non-obstructive during daily activities. A ring is also socially acceptable, unlike other wearable input devices,” said Cheng Zhang, the Georgia Tech graduate student who created the technology.

How it works

The system, which is called Fingersound, works pretty simply. The ring has an on-board gyroscope and microphone which detect when the user places their thumb over their fingers and begins to draw a shape. Once the shape is recognized, it can give tactile feedback. 

“Our system uses sound and movement to identify intended gestures, which improves the accuracy compared to a system just looking for movements,” said Zhang. 

“For instance, to a gyroscope, random finger movements during walking may look very similar to the thumb gestures. But based on our investigation, the sounds caused by these daily activities are quite different from each other.”  

Easy to use

The team says that the result is a system that is always available and easy to use. “When a person grabs their phone during a meeting, even if trying to silence it, the gesture can infringe on the conversation or be distracting,” explained Thad Starner, the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing professor leading the project. 

“But if they can simply send the call to voicemail, perhaps by writing an ‘x’ on their hand below the table, there isn’t an interruption.”

The full details of the project were presented at Unicomp and the ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing earlier this year.

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Wearable devices are still kinda expensive for several reasons. First, the components need to be small. Second, the components need to be pretty resilient to getting bashed about a little during daily use. And finally because people aren't buying that many of them yet, so economies of scale aren't there.

Now, a team from Florida State University might have a partial answer to those first two problems, with a new class of motion sensor that could make wearables do more for less.

Richard Liang, director of the High-Performance Materials Institute and professor at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, has led the development of an advanced series of motion sensors made using buckypaper - thin, flexible sheets of carbon nanotubes.

Silver ink

Inside the sensors, a strip of buckypaper is combined with silver ink electrodes that can be printed on a normal inkjet printer. The result is a sensor that is more sensitive than the flexible metallic sensors used in some wearables, but not as rigid and fragile as more-sensitive semiconductor sensors.

“We measure sensors by gauge factor, which indicates how much resistance value changes as a material is strained or bent,” said doctoral candidate Joshua DeGraff, the lead author of a paper describing the new technology.

“Our gauge factor has been up to eight times higher than commercial sensors and 75 percent higher than many other carbon nanotube sensors.”

Next steps

The next step in developing the sensor will be to further improve on the thickness of the device, allowing it to be integrated into clothing, as well as testing it on more complex models. 

“For sensor technology, you need it to be flexible, you need it to be affordable and you need it to be scalable," said Liang. 

"This new technology is versatile and the sensors are affordable to print. It’s a big innovation that presents many possibilities down the road.”

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On March 18 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared over the southern Indian Ocean. Remarkably, its fate is still unknown despite years of coordinated searches of many miles of sea.

Thanks to some new technological developments, perhaps the next plane to disappear won't go unfound for so long. 

A team at Cardiff University's School of Engineering has developed a way to use underwater microphones to precisely identify the time and location an object hits the surface of large bodies of water.

Making waves

The method relies on sound waves that can spread through water at the speed of sound. These waves occur naturally whenever something hits the sea surface, and some organisms like plankton even depend on them to propel themselves around the ocean.

These signals can be detected by specially-designed underwater microphones called hydrophones, and by triangulating the signals received at three or more different places, it's possible to find the exact time and position the signal originated from.

Testing Process

In testing, the team first dropped 18 balls into a water tank at various distances and heights and measured the acoustic waves that were generated. 

They then analysed data collected by hydrophones off the coast of Western Australia - these recorders are operated by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation, which uses them to detect underwater nuclear tests. Using the data, they were able to identify the time and location of a selection of recent earthquakes.

"By using existing detectors dotted all around our oceans and listening out for signatures from these deep ocean sound waves, we've uncovered a completely novel way of locating objects impacting on the sea surface," said Usama Kadri from Cardiff University's School of Mathematics, the lead author of a paper describing the method published in Scientific Reports.

"Tracking these acoustic gravity waves opens up a huge range of possibilities, from locating falling meteorites to detecting landslides, snowslides, storm surges, tsunamis and rogue waves."

Weak Signals

The team then went back and analysed the data from March 18 2014 - the night that MH370 disappeared. They detected two "remarkably weak signals" between midnight at 02:00 UTC. The weakness of the signals means there's a relatively large area of uncertainty.

"Though we've located two points around the time of MH370's disappearance from an unknown source, we cannot say with any real certainty that these have any association with the aircraft," said co-author of the study Davide Crivelli, from Cardiff University's School of Engineering.

"What we do know is that the hydrophones picked up remarkably weak signals at these locations and that the signals, according to our calculations, accounted for some sort of impact in the Indian Ocean. All of this information has been passed onto the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and we anticipate that both now, and in the future, this new source of information could be used in conjunction with a whole of host of other data that is at the disposal of the authorities."

• This giant smartwatch prototype has a shape-deforming backplate

Smartwatches are not an easy format for interaction designers. Their tiny screens and lack of buttons make it hard to give the user smart options in how to interact with the technology.

But interaction designers at Dartmouth College believe that they might have a solution. They've developed a smartwatch that lets users feel virtual objects, courtesy of a shape-shifting backplate.

In a concept device that's been named "RetroShape", every pixel on the screen has a corresponding tactile pixel (or taxel) on the rear. That means that programmers can use the wearer's skin underneath the watch to "feel" what's happening on-screen.

Sixteen independently-moving pins allow for shapes and movement to be rendered. The prototype is clunky and comes with a bundle of wires attached, but the technology could easily be improved and miniaturised if it became part of a commercial product.

Smart ring

Alongside RetroShape, the team has also developed a smart ring named "Fictio". It can deliver sensory feedback in six different ways, giving information to its wearer. For example, the team says, "If a wearer has plenty of time before the next meeting, the ring calendar reminder could be set to rotate freely."

"Only five minutes left before that meeting, the ring could be made to move with heavy resistance or forced to stop completely."

The watch, the ring, and a small collection of other devices will be presented at the 30th ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (UIST 2017) in Quebec City, Canada this week.

"Understanding and improving how humans interact with computers are essential parts of technology development," said Xing-Dong Yang, assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth.

If you're more interested in a wearable you can use right now, check out our list of the best smartwatches.

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Interaction designers love hand gestures. They're simple, generally pretty easy to learn, and intuitive. That makes them very handy for devices that lack sizeable screens, like smartwatches and other wearables.

But it's not simple to develop a foolproof way for a device to recognize those gestures. Accelerometers can help, but they're not very precise unless distinct and expansive gestures are made – which most users won't want to do in public.

Enter a team of researchers from the Bristol Interaction Group at the University of Bristol in the UK. They believe that ultrasonic imaging, as used in medicine and pregnancy scans, could hold the key to understanding hand movement.

By using a handheld ultrasound scanner and a collection of image processing algorithms and machine learning techniques, they were able to classify different muscle movements within the forearm as different gestures.

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High recognition accuracy

In testing, the system showed high recognition accuracy and – importantly – the ability to deliver results while positioned at the wrist, which is handy because that tends to be where people wear smartwatches.

The only problem is that ultrasound devices are still somewhat large and bulky, meaning that a lot of miniaturization work will need to be done to develop a workable prototype.

"With current technologies, there are many practical issues that prevent a small, portable ultrasonic imaging sensor integrated into a smartwatch," said Jess McIntosh, a PhD student who worked on the research.

"Nevertheless, our research is a first step towards what could be the most accurate method for detecting hand gestures in smartwatches."

The team published its results in the Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 

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Touch is one of the most important senses that humans have. As well as letting us sense the world around us, it also provides vital information when we meet other people - the old adage that you can tell a lot about a person from their handshake has at least a grain of truth in it.

Now researchers from Université Paris-Saclay are attempting to bestow the same benefits onto robots. Adriana Tapus and her colleagues are aiming to develop a humanoid robot that's sensitive to tactile stimulation in the same way people are.

“Giving robots a personality is the only way our relationship with artificial intelligence will survive," said Tapus. 

"If we can simulate a human like emotional response from a robot we can ensure a two-way relationship, benefiting the most vulnerable and isolated members of our society."

Social interaction strategies

Alongside a team that included Moustapha Hafez, Mehdi Ammi and Pierre-Henri Orefice, Tapus has been investigating the social interaction strategies that could allow robots to integrate in different human environments. 

For examples, the robots can elicit different emotions and dominance depending on the situation.

While testing a robot that could adjust its arm stiffness and amplitude in a handshake, the team claims that the system was able to infer the gender and how extroverted the person they were shaking hands with was in 75 percent of cases.

"Our research will help the next generation of social robots to be polite, empathetic, and maybe have their own sense of humour”, said Tapus.

• This is what happens when you get hit by a drone

Picture a utopian near-future scenario where drones have become everything that enthusiastic journalists like us claim they could be. Above your head, every day, you hear the quiet whine of a drone superhighway - ferrying packages, food and even emergency medical supplies across the city.

But one day, something goes wrong. A software glitch causes one drone to abruptly cease functioning in mid-air. The drone nose-dives towards the ground, but your soft body is in the way. The drone collides with you at terminal velocity, and it hurts. But how much?

That's what researchers from Virginia Tech are trying to figure out. They've been smashing drones into crash test dummies in a variety of different situations to try and model what happens when a drone inevitably hits a human.

Acceleration and force

They used three commercially available drones, weighing from 1.2 to 11 kilograms, along with a dummy equipped with acceleration and force sensors in its head and neck. In some tests they flew the drone into the dummy at full force, while in others the drone was dropped onto the dummy's head in different orientations. 

Those forces were then compared with standard benchmarks that have been established to test whether an object can cause severe or life-threatening injuries.

Their results show, as you'd probably expect, that the risk of injury increases with heavier drones. The smallest drone had only a 10 percent risk of causing severe neck injuries, but that rose to 70 percent with the largest one.

"There's a wide range of risk," said Steven Rowson, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and mechanics in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech. 

"In some instances it was low, and in some instances it was high, and there are lessons we can take away from that to reduce injury risk in a deliberate way through product design."

Injury risk

They also found that the drop tests were more likely to cause severe injuries than when a drone was flown into a person. And injury risk was reduced when an aircraft broke apart on impact, or if a protruding rotor arm, for example, deflected the aircraft away from the body. This suggests that it should be possible to design aircraft features specifically to make severe injuries less likely.

The results will be used to decide future regulations on whether drones can be flown over people, and the initial findings suggest that it should be safe for the smallest craft to fly overhead already.

"The big question right now is, what is the acceptable level of safety?" said Mark Blanks, the director of the Virginia Tech Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership. 

"How much proof does the FAA need before they say, 'Yes, that's okay'? Once those standards are in place, we're going to see huge expansion in the industry."

The full details of the study were published in the journal Annals of Biomedical Engineering. 

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The battle for the future of the automobile is looking like it's been won. Countries and companies all around the world are pledging to phase out petrol- and diesel-powered vehicles over the next decade in favour of their electric cousins.

While the change will be most visible on streets and roads, it's also trickling down to other vehicles. To that end, a consortium of Swiss companies has just announced that it's converting a huge dumper truck into what will become the world's largest electric vehicle.

The Komatsu HD 605-7, which weighs 45 tons when empty and has a capacity of 65 tons, has already spent several years working in a quarry, but now - in a factory in the Swiss town of Lommis - its diesel engine is being swapped for batteries. 

Laws of thermodynamics

The truck's daily schedule - trucking material from a mountain ridge down into a valley 20 times a day - makes it ideal for electric conversion. Instead of wasting heat energy on the brakes as the truck descends, the energy can be harvested and used to charge the batteries. 

If all goes as planned, the team claims, the truck apparently harvests more energy going downhill than it needs for the ascent, so it can actually feed surplus electricity into the grid (It's not exactly clear how that squares with the laws of thermodynamics).

Inside the truck, its 4.5-ton battery system consists of 1,440 nickel-manganese cobalt cells - the largest ever to be installed on a land vehicle. Nickel manganese cobalt cells are also the choice of the German automobile industry when it comes to the next generation of electric cars," says Marcel Held, who's in charge of the safety assessments.

If testing on the new vehicle goes well, then the owner of the truck plans to power up to eight similar vehicles electrically in the long run. For the company performing the upgrade, it opens up new fields for large-scale construction equipment, particularly those involved in areas sensitive to exhaust gas and noise.

• A new kind of artificial skin allows robot hands to feel the world

Around the world, there are a large number of labs working on artificial skin technology. The reason is simple - a breakthrough in this field could bring big benefits to many fields, from robotics to medicine.

The latest research group to publish their work is at the University of Houston. A team there, led by Cunjiang Yu, has developed a composite of rubber and semiconductors that can be stretched by up to 50 percent without damaging its electronic components. 

“Our strategy has advantages for simple fabrication, scalable manufacturing, high-density integration, large strain tolerance and low cost,” he said. 

Hot and cold

Normally, semiconductors are brittle and so using them in stretchable materials means creating complicated mechanical systems. This is the first work, the team claims, that embeds semiconductors in a stretchable material without any special mechanical structure.

In testing, the team showed that their skin could allow a robotic hand to sense the temperature of hot and iced water in a cup, and then perform the signals for hot and cold in American Sign Language.

“The robotic skin can translate the gesture to readable letters that a person like me can understand and read,” Yu said.

Beyond Robotic Hands

It's hoped that the system could be used beyond robotic hands too - perhaps in health monitors, medical implants and human-machine interfaces.

"We foresee that this strategy of enabling elastomeric semiconductors by percolating semiconductor nanofibrils into a rubber will advance the development of stretchable semiconductors," the team wrote in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

"It will move forward the advancement of stretchable electronics for a wide range of applications, such as artificial skins, biomedical implants and surgical gloves."

• Engineers are getting ready to hook up the quantum internet

From military strikes to aerial photography, there are a lot of applications for drone technology. But the one that gets a lot of humanitarian groups interested is delivery of medical supplies over terrain that would normally be difficult to traverse.

“Drones can operate where there are no roads, and overcome conditions that disable wheeled vehicles, traffic and other logistical inefficiencies that are the enemy of improved, timely patient diagnoses and care,” said Timothy Amukele, assistant professor of pathology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. 

“Drones are likely to be the 21st century’s best medical sample delivery system.” 

Amukele and his team have broken a distance record for the transport of medical supplies by drone, transporting human blood samples 161 miles across the Arizona desert. The flight took three hours.

Precise temperature

To ensure that the samples would still be viable after landing, they were maintained at a precise temperature by a controlled chamber designed specially by the team. For comparison purposes, an identical sample was maintained in a car at the airfield.

Due to the regulations surrounding drone flight in the United States, the test had to be carried out away from populated areas at a military test range that had been completely cleared of other air traffic. It was guided the whole way by a remote pilot using a radio link.

It's hoped that the system used can be developed into one that's ready for full-time use in the real world. "We expect that in many cases, drone transport will be the quickest, safest and most efficient option to deliver some biological samples to a laboratory from rural or urban settings," said Amukele.

"Getting diagnostic results far more quickly under difficult conditions will almost certainly improve care and save more lives."

• Engineers are getting ready to hook up the quantum internet

During the 60s and 70s, computers substantially changed many industries. But it wasn't until we hooked them up, en-masse, into the global internet that they were able to change the world.

That's why researchers around the globe are already working on the building blocks that will hook up the world's quantum computers - which are still very rudimentary - into a similar global network.

"The effort to build a quantum computer is often described as the 'space race of the 21st century', but today's computers didn't realise their full potential until we had the internet," said Matthew Sellars, Program Manager in the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the Australian National University.

Sellars leads a team that has developed a telecom-compatible quantum memory unit - a crucial component for such a network. 

"We have shown that an erbium-doped crystal is the perfect material to form the building blocks of a quantum internet that will unlock the full potential of future quantum computers."

Storage time

The team, which has been working on the project for a decade, showed that they could dramatically improve the storage time of quantum memory using the crystal. "A telecom-compatible quantum memory is a vital component for a practical quantum internet," said Rose Ahlefeldt, who also worked on the project.

"Memories allow us to buffer and synchronise quantum information, operations necessary for long range quantum communication."

The chief advantage of their design, which was detailed in a paper in the journal Nature Physics, is that it operates in the same band as regular telecoms networks. That means that it's compatible with existing fibre optic infrastructure. It's also compatible with many different kinds of quantum computer.

"This result is so exciting to me because it allows us to take a lot of the in-principle work we've demonstrated and turn it into practical devices for a full-scale quantum internet," said Sellars. 

"We had this idea 10 years ago, but many of our peers told us that such a simple idea couldn't work. Seeing this result, it feels great to know that our approach was the right one."

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Touchscreens have come on leaps and bounds since the first smartphones emerged almost twenty years ago. But now biologists are discovering that the rapid progress made in developing the technology could have benefits elsewhere too.

A team from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm has been experimenting with the conducting plastics used in smartphone screens. They've published a paper showing that by manipulating electrons on the surface of the plastic, bacteria can be tricked into growing more or less.

Here's how it works. When bacteria land somewhere where the conditions are right, they multiply into a thick film known as a "biofilm" that covers the surface. These exist all over the place - including your body - but can pose a danger in places like hospitals where they can cause infections.

The team, led by Agneta Richter-Dahlfors, found however that conducting plastics can encourage or discourage that growth. “When the bacteria land on a surface full of electrons, they cannot replicate”, she said. 

“They have nowhere to deposit their own electrons which they need to do in order to respire.” 

Opposite voltage

The opposite is also true. If the opposite voltage is applied then the bacteria can spread more rapidly. 

“With the electrons being continually sucked out of the surface, bacteria could continually deposit their own electrons, giving them the energy they needed to grow quickly,” said Richter-Dahlfors.

The next step is to test whether this principle can be used to develop cheap coatings for medical instruments that inhibit the spread of pathogens. 

“To begin with, we can coat medical devices with this material to make them more resistant to colonisation by bacteria”, says Professor Richter-Dahlfors. 

“However, if we look to industries like wastewater management that need a lot of beneficial biofilms to create clean water, we can produce surfaces that will promote biofilm production”, she said.

The full details of the technology were published in the journal NPJ Biofilms and Microbiomes. 

• This pen-sized device can identify cancerous cells in seconds

Spotting the difference between cancerous tissue and normal tissue is a challenge, even for highly-trained surgeons. The standard method, called Frozen Section Analysis, is slow - taking 30 minutes or more to prepare and interpret. All the while, the patient must be kept anesthetized.

Now, however, engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a new tool that they claim can perform the same task in about ten seconds. It's called the MasSpec Pen.

“If you talk to cancer patients after surgery, one of the first things many will say is ‘I hope the surgeon got all the cancer out,’” says Livia Schiavinato Eberlin, an assistant professor of chemistry at UT Austin who designed the study and led the team. 

“It’s just heartbreaking when that’s not the case. But our technology could vastly improve the odds that surgeons really do remove every last trace of cancer during surgery.”

96% accurate

In tests on 253 human cancer patients, the MasSpec Pen was able to give a diagnosis within ten seconds that was not only 96% accurate, but also able to detect cancer in regions between normal and cancerous tissues.

It works by releasing a drop of water onto the tissue, then sucking it back up. The resulting sample is then evaluated in comparison with a database of samples gathered during the testing process. Those included normal and cancerous tissues from the breast, lung, thyroid and ovary. When complete, the words "Normal" or "Cancer" appear on a computer screen.

“When designing the MasSpec Pen, we made sure the tissue remains intact by coming into contact only with water and the plastic tip of the MasSpec Pen during the procedure,” says Jialing Zhang, research associate at the Eberlin Lab at UT Austin who led the experimental work. 

“The result is a biocompatible and automated medical device that we are so excited to translate to the clinic very soon.”

“Any time we can offer the patient a more precise surgery, a quicker surgery or a safer surgery, that’s something we want to do,” says James Suliburk, head of endocrine surgery at Baylor College of Medicine and a collaborator on the project. “This technology does all three. It allows us to be much more precise in what tissue we remove and what we leave behind.”

The full details of the project were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

• Using a phone while pregnant is unlikely to have any effects on your child's brain

Children are like the anti-money tree – they grow at an extremely quick pace (around seven sizes in their first two years) and on average, their parents spend around £2,000 on their clothing alone before the age of three. 

This constant cycle of producing and discarding clothing doesn’t just have a major impact on household finances, it also places immense pressure on the environment and it’s a problem which the latest UK Dyson award winner is looking to solve. 

24 year old Ryan Yasin, a recent graduate from the Royal College of Art, has used his engineering skills to create a line of clothing which expands in both directions and is able to continuously fit children as they grow. 

Room to grow

Called Petit Pli, the line currently fits children aged six months to 36 months and you can see how it works in the video below:

Yasin has used Negative Poisson’s ratio, which he first came across when studying aeronautical engineering, to develop the clothing. 

By combining this ratio (also known as auxetics) with pleating, the clothing becomes thicker when stretched. Essentially the as a child grows, the pleats fold together or expand to move with them and as a result of heat treatment, the properties are able to last even through the wash cycle.

Speaking of the wash cycle, Petit Pli clothing also uses a hydrophobic coating which makes it waterproof. Whether your child is splashing in puddles or throwing a tantrum at dinner, any liquid should just pour straight off. 

When it’s not in use, Yasin says the clothing becomes small enough to store in your pocket but when your child outgrows it completely, it’s completely recyclable too. 

Winning the UK James Dyson Award means Yasin will receive a prize of £2,000 and be entered into the international round of the competition where he could win £30,000. 

With the prize money currently in his pocket, Yasin hopes to further his research and development and form a team of expert that will help him turn Petit Pli into a business.

He’s already in discussions with distributors and manufacturers – the next stage is capturing the interest of potential investors which should be much more achievable with the award behind him. 

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The process of miniaturisation hits every technology sooner or later. From laptops, to smartphones, to smartwatches. And now to the self-driving car.

Engineers at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and the University of California San Diego in the US have developed a "spherical micromotor" that can autonomously navigate through a maze. "We have embedded artificial intelligence into a micro/nanorobot," Longqiu Li, who led the project, told Phys.org. 

"We introduce a smart microvehicle for precise autonomous navigation in complicated and dynamically changing environments through optimal path planning. Similar to their large vehicle counterparts, the autonomous navigation of microvehicles entails collision-free movement in dynamic environments."

All external

All that intelligence doesn't fit inside the robot itself, of course - it's all external. A camera scans the maze, and sends the data to an image processor which identifies obstacles and creates a map. 

Then that map is sent to an AI planner which determines the shortest collision-free path to the destination. Finally, the AI sends its route to a magnetic field generator, which actually steers the teensy car.

What it's for

Applications for the technology include the ability to deliver drugs, diagnose disorders or conduct precision surgery within the body. To do that, they'll develop features like autonomous braking, "cruise control", lane-keeping and interactivity with the environment.

"We want to apply the micro/nanorobotic systems in the field of biomedical operations and nanoscale manipulation," Li said.

The full details of the technology were published in ACS Nano.

• Magnesium power cell breakthrough could mean batteries that don't explode

Lithium-ion batteries are wonderful. They've changed the way we interact with technology over the last couple of decades, taking us from desktops, to laptops, to smartphones, to smartwatches. But there's a problem - lithium-ion batteries have a nasty habit of occasionally exploding.

So engineers around the world are working on safer replacements. One of the candidates involves replacing the lithium with magnesium, but historically the ability of magnesium batteries to store energy has been somewhat limited.

Enter Yan Yao, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, who believes he's made a pair of breakthroughs that could yield substantially greater efficiencies from these batteries.

“We are combining a nanostructured cathode and a new understanding of the magnesium electrolyte,” said Yao. “That’s new.”

For several years he's been working on getting magnesium ions to move faster. Faster-moving ions means more efficiency. Simultaneously, he's redesigned the cathode - the point from which the current flows - for greater performance.

General strategy

The result is a magnesium battery with a storage capacity of 400 mAh/g, compared with 100 mAh/g for earlier magnesium batteries. Traditional lithium ion batteries have a cathode capacity of about 200 mAh/g.

However, the voltage of the magnesium batteries can't yet compete with lithium. They output about a volt, compared with three to four volts for lithium. 

But magnesium is much more abundant on Earth than lithium is, so it can be made more cheaply. And - importantly - magnesium batteries don't suffer from the same problems that lead lithium batteries to catch fire.

“We hope this is a general strategy,” said Hyun Deog Yoo, who also worked on the project.

“Inserting various polyatomic ions in higher voltage hosts, we eventually aim to create higher-energy batteries at a lower price, especially for electric vehicles."

The full details of the discovery were published in Nature Communications. 

• A nanoscale monster truck has taken the bronze medal in the world's shortest race

A monster truck that's so small that it can't be seen with the naked eye has taken third place in a gruelling 30-hour race across a distance a fraction of the width of a human hair.

The race, which took place in April 2017 at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in Toulouse, was the first of its kind. It was designed to challenge engineers to create 'nanocars' just a few molecules in size, as well as getting the public excited in nanotechnology.

Now, however, the creators of the third place finisher - officially named the Bobcat Nanowagon - have been talking about how their vehicle worked at the 254th National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society.

Oversized Wheels

It had a frame made of psuedorotaxane, the team from Ohio University said, and four large cucurbituril molecules for the wheels, which led to it being dubbed a monster truck despite measuring just 3.5 nanometres in length.

Unlike regular-sized cars, it had no motor. So it was propelled along the course, which was made of gold and silver, but a special instrument. "We incorporated positive charge receptors in the car," said Saw-Wai Hla, who co-led the team that built the vehicle alongside Eric Masson. 

"So if we injected a positive charge in the STM tip pointed at the car, there would be repulsion, and the car would move. We found it worked very well."

Half the world away

Even more impressively, they did it from the other side of the world. The lab only had four machines for propelling cars and there were six entrants, so the Ohio team drove it remotely. 

"My understanding is that this was a first," Hla says. "We manipulated the car at the atomic scale from half a globe away."

Unfortunately their truck got stuck about 43nm into the race, which was jointly won by Swiss team and a US-Austrian team. So the Ohio team took home a bronze medal, after making it substantially further than any of the other cars that didn't finish. 

“Our nanocar was able to move as expected, and we learned quite a lot,” Hla said. 

"Every team had its own goal," added Masson. "Ours was to see if we could deposit an intact supramolecular assembly onto a surface, and control its motion."

• MIT's Interactive Robogami lets you design and 3D-print origami-inspired robots

Robots are becoming ever more common around the world, but they're also becoming more and more complicated to make. 

So engineers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory have developed a tool that lets anyone design a robot in minutes, and then 3D-print and assemble it in as little as four hours.

It's called Interactive Robogami, because it's heavily inspired by origami - the Japanese art of paper folding. 

"Designing robots usually requires expertise that only mechanical engineers and roboticists have," said Adriana Schulz, co-lead author on a paper describing the system. 

"What's exciting here is that we've created a tool that allows a casual user to design their own robot by giving them this expert knowledge."

Library of Bodies

The software combines simulations and interactive feedback with algorithms for design composition, so that users can make high-level decisions (how many wheels should it have) rather than low-level ones (exactly what position should those wheels go in).

The system includes a library of different bodies, wheels, legs and other peripherals, alongside different gaits. Most importantly, though, the system guarantees that what you build will work - preventing you from building a bot that's so top-heavy it falls over, for example.

Once designed, you can 3D-print it as flat faces that can then be connected at joints and folded into the final shape. The team says that this approach combines the best bits of both 2D (lightweight, fast) and 3D (complexity, rigidity) printing.

"By 3D-printing 2D patterns, we can leverage these advantages to develop strong, complex designs with lightweight materials," said Cynthia Sung, the other co-lead author.

Lowering the barrier

To test the system, the designers asked eight volunteers to try it out. They were given twenty minutes of training, then asked to perform two tasks - the first was the creation of a stable car design, the second was to design a trajectory for an existing robot to travel through an obstacle course.

The results of the trial showed that the print-and-fold method reduced printing time by 73 percent and the amount of material by 70% over a more traditional approach.

The team hopes that the tool will allow people to incorporate robots into their everyday lives. "You can quickly design a robot that you can print out, and that will help you do these tasks very quickly, easily, and cheaply," said Sung. 

"It's lowering the barrier to have everyone design and create their own robots."

• This stretchy biofuel cell powers wearables from your sweat

For years, wearables have had something of a power conundrum. Without a bulky and annoying rechargeable battery, there's no way to supply components with the energy they need to operate.

Multiple research teams across the globe are tackling this problem - trying to figure out how to harvest energy from the body's motion or its surroundings. But to date, these haven't succeeded in producing enough power, or they aren't stretchy and flexible enough to conform to the human body.

But now engineers at the University of California San Diego claim to have made a breakthrough. They've developed a biofuel cell that can extract enough energy from the body's sweat to power electronics like LEDs and Bluetooth radios.

How it works

Using a combination of chemistry, advanced materials and electronic interfaces, their fuel cell delivers ten times more power per surface area than any existing wearable biofuel cell.

Here's how it works. Using lithography, the team built up a stretchy electronic foundation out of gold, then screen printed three-dimensional carbon nanotube-based cathode and anode arrays on top. Finally, they filled the cell with an enzyme that oxidises the lactic acid found in human sweat to generate a current.

The challenge came in increasing the cell's energy density. "We needed to figure out the best combination of materials to use and in what ratio to use them," said Amay Bandodkar, one of the first authors on a paper describing the technology, published in Energy & Environmental Science

In tests, the team hooked up the cell to a custom made circuit board and had a team of volunteers cycle on a stationary bike. They were able to power a blue LED for about four minutes.

The team says that it's hoping to improve that lifespan by figuring out a way to store the energy produced and then release it gradually. They'd also like to replace the silver oxide used in the cathode, which degrades over time, with something more stable.

• Nasa's 'Mars 2020' mission will hunt for signs of past life

The end of the days where warehouses are staffed with people is within sight. In recent years, more and more robots have been stacking and retrieving for online stores like Amazon, increasing efficiency but at the same time reducing opportunities for human employment.

Every year, following the RoboCup, a second international competition is held for these warehousing bots - the Amazon Robotics Challenge. Contestants are asked to design a shelving system alongside a bot that perform both a pick task and a stow task. 

In the pick task, the robot must interpret a set of picking orders, grab the products from the shelves according to the order list, and then place those products into three different boxes. In the stow task, the robot must put products onto shelves, and then document the contents of those shelves.

Pick up and store

What's tricky, though, is that the teams are only given the full list of products that'll be on the list 30 minutes before the start of the competition. Before that, they only know half. So the ability to quickly teach the robots what they need to pick up and store is very important.

One of the competing teams came from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. “As today’s warehouse systems have reached their technical limits, we wanted to develop a completely new system for the 21st century in order to make full use of the advantages of the robot gripper," said Kai Markert, who captained the team.

Their system used either a gripper or a suction pad depending on the product to be picked. A camera supplied 2D and 3D images of the product, and neural networks were combined with image recognition algorithms to figure out what the objects actually were. Their bot could either have pre-set grip points, or points calculated from the position and size of the object.

You can see it in action here:

"In an exciting week with three intensive competition days we mastered several challenges and learned a lot. It was a big success for our young team to be able to compete with the best in the world in Japan," added Markert.

• Emoji is being used to teach computers sarcasm because that's just what we need

For several years, an all-volunteer team of aviators and scientists have been working on getting a glider to the edge of space.

For many years, it was thought impossible that gliders - which lack engines - could sustain themselves at extreme altitudes. Gliders need air to achieve lift, but as you get higher and higher into the sky the amount of air available decreases dramatically.

In 2006, however, pilots Steve Fossett and Einar Enevoldson took a standard glider named Perlan I up to an altitude of 15.5km using a meteorological phenomenon called stratospheric waves.

Minus 70°C

Now, a new group of pilots are hoping to best that. The Perlan team are building a new glider with wings that can fly with less than three percent of normal air density and in temperatures of minus 70°C. 

The testing is going well. In a model named Perlan 2, pilots Jim Payne, Morgan Sandercock, Tim Gardner and Miguel Iturmendi recently set an altitude record for their craft at 9.9km over El Calafate in Argentina. 

They have their sights set much higher - the target altitude is 27.4km. But the goal isn't solely to hit big numbers. 

"The Perlan 2 will fly to 90,000 feet at the edge of space to explore the science of giant mountain waves that help create the ozone hole and change global climate models," wrote the team, which is supported by Airbus. 

High altitude turbulence

By collecting data from the upper reaches of the atmosphere in a craft that, unlike a weather balloon, can stay in place and be steered, the team wants to find out more about the factors that drive climate change. They also hope to collect data on the effects of high altitude turbulence and radiation on pilots and aircraft.

Perlan Project CEO Ed Warnock said, "Just last month the world witnessed another reminder of the importance of understanding climate change, with the fracture from the Antarctic ice shelf of an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware." 

• How you board a plane affects your chances of getting ill afterwards

Finding places on Earth to test rovers designed for space exploration is surprisingly tricky. But planetary roboticists from the European Space Agency (ESA) have found a part of the world that's unusually Moon-like - the volcanic island of Tenerife.

And not even all of it - the perfect spot, they say, is the Teide National Park, in an area called Las Minas de San José. "It's hard to find suitable locations like this one," said ESA robotics engineer Martin Azkarate. 

"Compared to rockier volcanic areas nearby where the rovers would not be able to traverse at all, this place is manoeuvrable while also moon-like – with sand and small stones above rock – and big enough for us to make more than 13 km of traverses."

The ESA has been doing those traverses with a pair of new rovers that are designed for exploring the polar regions of the Moon. Lighting conditions near the Moon's poles will be more unusual, which the team is simulating by conducting the drills in the dark.

"Their high latitude means the Sun stays low on the horizon, casting long shadows, and deep craters stay mired in permanent shadow – potentially storing scientifically interesting water ice and other frozen volatiles," said Azkarate. 

"Until now, planetary rovers have always been operated during local daylight."

Different sensors

The team wants to find out the best ways of navigating the lunar surface in conditions of "varied illumination". They're testing various different sensors and software tools to let them do that - including stereo cameras, ranging cameras, laser-radar sensors, inertial measurement units and wheel sensors.

In some cases, the rovers were controlled directly. But they also did some tests where they were allowed to control themselves. 

"The moon is close enough for direct remote control, albeit with a slight time delay," explained robotics engineer Levin Gerdes. 

"But for Mars, the distance involved makes that impossible. Instead martian rovers are periodically uploaded with sets of telecommands to follow. This is a slow process however. A faster, self-navigating rover is seen as a necessary technology for future missions, like self-driving cars on Earth."

The team plans to return to Las Minas de San José in September for more testing.

• Turning polluting CO2 into nanotube wool could be a big-bucks green business

Figuring out where things are is an important task that many robots need to know how to do. In applications from health and emergency response to military and even entertainment, it's a pretty basic requirement.

"However, our robots are still far behind the accuracy, efficiency and adaptability of the algorithms which exist in biological systems,” says Zahra Bagheri, a PhD student at the University of Adelaide, who's working on developing new ways of seeing.

She's part of a team of engineers and neuroscientists using the way insects visualise and hunt prey to improve autonomous robotic technology. 

"Our research aimed to discover if the behaviour and neuronal mechanisms that underlie an insect’s target detection and selection could provide a blueprint for a robot to perform similar tasks autonomously,” said Steven Wiederman, who's leading the project.

"Insects are capable of remarkably complex behaviour, yet have a miniature brain consuming tiny amounts of power compared with even the most efficient digital processors."

Recording neurons

As part of the research, the team used recordings from specific neurons in the brain of a dragonfly to develop a target detection and tracking algorithm. They they built that algorithm into a robot's brain.

"This is the first time that a target tracking model inspired by insect neurophysiology has been implemented on an autonomous robot and tested under real-world conditions," said Wiederman.

In tests, which included low-contrast targets, heavily cluttered environments and the presence of distractors, the robot performed well - suggesting that simple processors can be used to deliver capable results.

"We uncovered insight into how insects’ neuronal systems may handle varying challenges during target tracking and pursuit," said Bagheri.

• Sorry, space tourists: Mars is less habitable than we hoped

With festival season in full swing, many of you no doubt wonder on a regular basis why smartphone batteries aren't getting better. The answer is simple - they are getting better, but manufacturers choose to use that power to bump up specs rather than delivering improved battery life.

Now, however, engineers at the University of Washington have taken a very interesting leap into a totally different way of powering a phone. They've used commercial, off-the-shelf components to design a cellphone that can make and receive calls without a battery at all.

“We’ve built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power,” said Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW and co-author on a paper describing the technology.

Instead, the phone pulls power from its environment - either from ambient radio signals harvested by an antenna, or ambient light collected by a solar cell the size of a grain of rice. The device consumes just 3.5 microwatts of power during use.

“To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed," said Gollakota.

Analog to digital

The biggest step was eliminating the analog-to-digital converter that turns your voice into data. Instead, they took advantage of tiny vibrations that happen in a microphone when a person is talking into it, or a speaker when someone is listening. 

An antenna converts that motion into radio signals in a way that uses almost no power. The only downside is that the user has to press a button to switch between speaking and listening modes. In testing, the team was able to make calls and even use Skype.

Right now the battery-free phone needs a custom base station to transmit and receive calls. But the team says there's no reason why the technology couldn't be integrated into standard mobile network infrastructure.

“You could imagine in the future that all cell towers or Wi-Fi routers could come with our base station technology embedded in it,” said co-author Vamsi Talla, a former UW electrical engineering doctoral student and Allen School research associate. 

“And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cellphone coverage everywhere."

• Nasa is building satellites to deflect asteroids from Earth impact

The risk of humanity going extinct due to a large asteroid hitting the Earth is small, but large enough to be worth worrying about. Don't believe me? Just ask the dinosaurs. 

That's why Nasa has a particular interest in developing technology that could deflect an asteroid on a dangerous trajectory towards Earth. And now its latest project, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (or DART for short), has just been moved from the "concept development" phase to the "preliminary design" phase.

DART is a fridge-sized spacecraft that uses what its engineers are calling the "kinetic impactor technique" - a fancy name for a process not unlike how snooker balls behave. The spacecraft is designed to slam into the side of an asteroid to nudge it off course.

You might think that a tiny spacecraft wouldn't have much effect on a massive asteroid, and you'd be right. But if you catch the asteroid early enough then even a tiny course correction should be enough to shift its path away from Earth.

"DART is a critical step in demonstrating we can protect our planet from a future asteroid impact," said Andy Cheng, who is co-leading the DART investigation at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Testing it Out

Cheng and his colleagues are planning to test DART on a small, non-threatening asteroid in 2024. The target is known as 65803 Didymos, and has been closely studied since 2003. The spacecraft will fly close to the asteroid and then use an autonomous targeting system to aim itself. 

It'll then strike the body at a speed about nine times faster than a bullet, while astronomers on Earth keep track of the results. A bit like this:

"Since we don't know that much about their internal structure or composition, we need to perform this experiment on a real asteroid," explained Cheng. 

"With DART, we can show how to protect Earth from an asteroid strike with a kinetic impactor by knocking the hazardous object into a different flight path that would not threaten the planet."

• This robot is designed to milk scorpions

3D printing works in a pretty simple way - you build up a three-dimensional object over time in a series of layers. But now a team of Austrian computer scientists has designed an alternative approach.

They've created flat sheets that can transform themselves into smooth-surfaced, free-form objects. Similar technology has been possible for some time - it's not far off traditional Japanese origami - but the technique was limited to objects with sharp edges and very little curvature.

Now, however,  the engineers have figured out how to create curves. They do so using tiny tiles sandwiched between pre-stretched layers of latex. During the transformation, the tension in the latex pulls the tiles together into a continuous shell.

“I experimented with so many different materials and methods before coming up with our current design,” said Ruslan Guseinov, first author on a paper describing the technology, which will be presented at this year's SIGGRAPH conference.

The tricky thing was developing the tools to allow these objects to be printed (on a 2D printer). When the user feeds a three-dimensional shape into the algorithm, it generates a 2D tile layout that specifies the orientation, shape and location of each tile and connecting pin.

In action

That's a difficult computing task - so the algorithm splits it in two. First it makes a rough 'first draft' of a solution, then performs local refinements before finally producing a final template. Here it is in action, on a Batman mask, hard hat, cow and turtle:

"Our research is a step toward the development of new fabrication technologies: there have been many advances in flat fabrication, for instance in electronics, that have previously been limited to 2D shapes," Guseinov explained. 

"With CurveUps, we make it possible to produce 3D objects empowered with these same technologies, pushing the limits of digital manufacturing far beyond the current state."

• This robot is designed to milk scorpions

The list of jobs where robots can perform more effectively than humans is already pretty long. Factory workers, farmers, taxi drivers, construction workers, security guards, and surgeons are all confronting the oncoming train of obsolescence.

And now we can add another entry to that list - scorpion milkers. A team of Moroccan engineers has developed a robotic device for extracting valuable venom from scorpions without danger.

"The extraction of scorpion venom is a very difficult task and usually takes at least two experimenters," said Mouad Mkamel, who designed the robot with a team of researchers from Ben M'sik Hassan II University, Morocco. 

"There are numerous risks including potentially deadly scorpion stings and electric shocks from the stimulators used to extract the venom."

More Safety

So they built a lightweight, portable robotic device that does the job for them. "It is designed to extract scorpion venom without harming the animal and to provide more safety for the experimenters," explained Mkamel.

It works by clamping the tail of the scorpion and then electrically stimulating it so that it expresses droplets of venom, which can then be captured and safely stored. 

That might sound a little cruel, but it's substantially better than current methods which either involve electrical stimulation by hand or physically puncturing the venom gland in the creature's abdomen.

The device has an LED screen and can be programmed to adjust and remember specific settings for different species. 

"[Our robot] could be used by one person using a remote control to safely recover scorpion venom remotely," added Mkamel.

• Your brainwaves can reveal your password

Almost every flying creature is able to walk. From butterflies, to birds, to bats, to bees. But most flying drones can't – once they land, they have to take off again if they want to get anywhere.

So engineers at MIT have solved this problem by equipping a system of quadcopters that can both fly and drive. It's an approach, they say, that could represent one path towards flying cars.

A team of researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have published a paper that describes a system of eight quadcopters that can operate within a tiny city, complete with parking spaces, no-fly zones and landing pads.

“The ability to both fly and drive is useful in environments with a lot of barriers, since you can fly over ground obstacles and drive under overhead obstacles,” said PhD student Brandon Araki, lead author on the paper. 

Gains in efficiency

Adding wheels to the drone reduced its battery life a little due to the weight of the components, by about 14%. But the team says the gains in efficiency from driving more than make up for this loss of efficiency in flying.

“Normal drones can't maneuver on the ground at all," said Araki. "A drone with wheels is much more mobile while having only a slight reduction in flying time.”

While testing the drones, the team built a simulated city – using fabric for roads and cardboard boxes for buildings. They tested their eight bots at the same time, giving each a start point and an end point to reach without colliding with another vehicle.

CSAIL Director Daniela Rus believes the research could lead to more practical applications: “As we begin to develop planning and control algorithms for flying cars, we are encouraged by the possibility of creating robots with these capabilities at small scale,” she said. 

“While there are obviously still big challenges to scaling up to vehicles that could actually transport humans, we are inspired by the potential of a future in which flying cars could offer us fast, traffic-free transportation.”

• Playing videogames make some parts of your brain more efficient

Researchers at The University of California Santa Barbara have developed a system that allows a pair of drones working together to see through walls.

The technique, which uses nothing but standard Wi-Fi signals and off-the-shelf components, was invented by researchers working in the lab of Yasamin Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. 

"Our proposed approach has enabled unmanned aerial vehicles to image details through walls in 3D with only Wi-Fi signals,” said Mostofi.

“This approach utilizes only Wi-Fi [signal strength] measurements, does not require any prior measurements in the area of interest and does not need objects to move to be imaged.” 

You can see the drones in action in the following video:

Signal strength

In tests, the team demonstrated two autonomous octocopters taking off and flying outside an enclosed, four-sided brick house. One copter continuously transmits a Wi-Fi signal, while the other one measures the strength of that signal.

A picture can then be built up of the contents of the house, because the signal is affected by the shapes of the objects within. The result is a high-resolution 3D image of the interior, which closely matched the real thing. 

“High-resolution 3D imaging through walls, such as brick walls or concrete walls, is very challenging," said Chitra R. Karanam, the lead PhD student on the project, "and the main motivation for the proposed approach."

Mostofi added: "Enabling 3D through-wall imaging of real areas is considerably more challenging due to the considerable increase in the number of unknowns."

The full details of the system were published on the web.

• Electric cars could charge while on the move, thanks to this wireless breakthrough

Wireless phone chargers like those rumoured to be included with the next iPhone are great and all, but they have some pretty major drawbacks. The most notable is that the transmitter and receiver have to be sitting pretty much still for the charging to work.

The reason is that the frequency of the signals in this form of wireless power transfer – known as magnetic resonance coupling – needs to be tuned to the right distance. Continuously and automatically detecting that distance is a complex task. 

But new research from Stanford University engineers suggests that it may not be impossible. A team led by Shanhui Fan – a professor of electrical engineering and senior author on a study describing the research published in Nature – has successfully managed to wirelessly transfer energy to a moving LED lightbulb.

How it works

They did it by replacing key components of the transmitter with a commercially-available voltage amplifier and feedback resistor. That lets the system automatically figure out the right frequency for different distances without human interference. 

Here's a video of the team showing how it works:

“Adding the amplifier and resistor allows power to be very efficiently transferred across most of the three-foot range and despite the changing orientation of the receiving coil,” said graduate student Sid Assawaworrarit, the study’s lead author. 

“This eliminates the need for automatic and continuous tuning of any aspect of the circuits.”

Push the distance

So far power transfers on the system have been very small – a single milliwatt, whereas charging and electric car requires something like ten million times that quantity. But the distance that the electricity can be transferred is already sufficient.

“We still need to significantly increase the amount of electricity being transferred to charge electric cars, but we may not need to push the distance too much more,” said Fan.

"The hope is that you’ll be able to charge your electric car while you’re driving down the highway. A coil in the bottom of the vehicle could receive electricity from a series of coils connected to an electric current embedded in the road.”

He added: “In addition to advancing the wireless charging of vehicles and personal devices like cellphones, our new technology may untether robotics in manufacturing, which also are on the move.”

• Seaweed could extend the lives of future batteries

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that there's too much carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Human industrial activity pumps it into the air and natural systems aren't able to disperse it fast enough.

So it's building up in greater and greater quantities, which is a problem because it traps heat like a giant blanket. The Earth's temperature is slowly rising. But a team of engineers in Finland believe they might have the beginning of a solution that could kill two birds with one stone.

They've built a pilot plant that can not only suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, but then subsequently turn it into renewable fuels and useful chemicals so that we don't have to use as many fossil fuels.

How it works

The system is divided into four different parts. The first is a solar power plant which generates the energy to power the process. The second pulls CO2 and water out of the atmosphere and stores them separately. The third splits the water into hydrogen using electrolysis. The fourth uses that hydrogen, combined with the CO2, to produce a substitute for crude oil.

The neat thing about the plant is that it's small-scale and fits into the distributed, networked power grids of the future. Production capacity can be increased by simply adding more units.

The plant will be put through its paces between May and September 2017. If the pilot is a success, then additional units will be built and used in a number of EU projects in the coming years.

"The concept we are exploring is an example of how the chemical industry could be electrified in the future", said Jero Ahola of the Lappeenranta University of Technology, where the plant is located. 

"The burning of fossil fuels must end by 2050, but people will continue to need some hydrocarbons."

• Astronauts will soon be able to bake bread on the International Space Station

There are a lot of robots in the world. Mostly they live in factories, but they're increasingly making their way into everyday life - and there are some big decisions on the horizon about how we'll safeguard certain parts of our way of life as they do so.

Now, a team of roboticists at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed a simulation that indicates that adding some self-doubt to robots could help them better integrate into society. The big question is: how much?

"It is clear that one of the primary tools we can use to mitigate the potential risk from a misbehaving AI system is the ability to turn the system off", the researchers wrote in a paper published on the pre-print arXiv server.

"As the capabilities of AI systems improve, it is important to ensure that such systems do not adopt subgoals that prevent a human from switching them off. Our goal is to study the incentives an agent has to allow itself to be switched off." 

The simulation they created depicts an interaction between a robot and a human with an adjustable level of self-confidence for the robot, which has a built in off-switch.

The wishes of the human

In one simulation, the robot was asked to perform a task, and a human was then given the option of allowing it to continue or hitting the off switch. But the robot also had the ability to override its own off-switch and therefore the wishes of the human.

As you can probably expect, robots that had a lot of self-confidence turned themselves right back on. When they were given just a little confidence, however, the robot stayed off - even if it judged that it was doing a good job.

"Our analysis suggests that agents with uncertainty about their utility function have incentives to accept or seek out human oversight. Thus, systems with uncertainty about their utility function are a promising area for research on the design of safe AI systems," the researchers wrote.

They added: "This is far from the end of the story. In future work, we plan to explore incentives to defer to the human in a sequential setting and explore the impacts of model misspecification."

• Google's Street View cars are now tracking air pollution

What's the leading cause of deaths in the world today? I'll give you a hint. It's not obesity or malnutrition. It's not HIV, malaria, bird flu or any other infectious disease. It's not war, and it's definitely not terrorism.

It's air pollution - responsible for 5.5 million deaths in 2015. Toxins and particles suspended in the air contribute to an enormous range of conditions and diseases, from heart attacks, to stroke, to mental illness, to neurological and respiratory disorders. Almost half of the world's population, rising to 80 percent of people living in cities, breathe air that is unsafe for humans.

But it's hard to tell, if you live in a city, where the most dangerous areas are. That's why, for the last year, Google has been driving its Street View cars around Oakland, California, with air pollution sensors on the roofs. And now the company has released its first map of the results.

In partnership with the University of Texas, the search company mapped 78 square miles of Oakland over an entire year, collecting readings every 30 metres or so. That's an extremely high level of detail - substantially greater than is possible with traditional static air quality monitors. Most large urban areas have one air quality monitor for every 100-200 square miles.

Incredible detail

"Air pollution varies very finely in space, and we can't capture that variation with other existing measurement techniques," said Joshua Apte, an assistant professor at the Cockrell School of Engineering and lead author of a paper describing the results that was published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

"Using our approach and analysis techniques, we can now visualize air pollution with incredible detail. This kind of information could transform our understanding of the sources and impacts of air pollution."

What surprised the researchers in the data is that there are locations that can be six times more polluted on one end of a city block than on the other. Hotspots included the port, busy traffic intersections, restaurants, warehouses, industrial plants and car dealerships.

"You could use this information when you're picking a school for your kids. Is there a school with a playground that might have better air quality because your kid has asthma?" Apte said. 

"This hyper-local information about consistent air quality can be really useful for people, especially those who are vulnerable because of age or health condition." 

• Your smartphone's compass can protect you from voice hacks

Siri might be laughably incompetent right now, but it's hard to argue that voice won't play a substantial role in our future interactions with our smart devices.

Unfortunately, voice is one of the easiest things to hack. With an audio sample just a few minutes long, it's possible for an attacker to simulate your voice convincingly enough to trick both people and high-end voice recognition systems.

Now, however, a team of New York State University engineers has developed a defence against this threat. Using only tools already on smartphones, it can detect machine-based voice impersonation attacks.

“Every aspect of your life is now on your phone,” said Kui Ren, director of the Ubiquitous Security and Privacy Research Laboratory and lead author on a paper describing the defence system that'll be presented this week in Atlanta at the 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems. 

“That is your security hub. It is really critical now.”

How it works

Any attempt to replay your voice to fool a computer system must be broadcast on a speaker, and speakers generate a magnetic field as they operate. Inside your phone, however, is a magnetometer that's normally used as a compass in navigation apps.

As well as this, the system uses the smartphone's trajectory mapping algorithm to figure out the distance between the phone and the speaker. By mandating that a user be close to their phone when speaking, it guarantees that the magnetic field will be detected.

Finally, as a third layer of security, the system asks the user to move the phone in front of their mouth while using voice recognition. When a speaker playing a voice recording is moved, the magnetic field will change and the phone can detect it.

“With the Internet of things, what is a security interface? It is not like the phone. There is often no touchscreen or keypad so voice authentication may be useful,” said Ren.

“Technology is advancing so fast; we have to think of different ways. The strategy is using multiple lines of defense. We call that defense in depth."

• This AI can figure out when you'll die

Making a robot is hard. Don't take my word for it, take the word of Stelian Coros, assistant professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. 

"The process of creating new robotic systems today is notoriously challenging, time-consuming and resource-intensive," he says. "In the not-so-distant future, however, robots will be part of the fabric of daily life and more people -- not just roboticists -- will want to customize robots."

That's why Coros' lab has developed an interactive design tool that allows both novices and experts to develop customised legged or wheeled robots using 3D-printed and off-the-shelf components.

It's pretty simple to use – scroll through a library of components and then drag and drop them into the design. It'll even suggest components that are compatible with each other, automatically generate structural components, and suggest where actuators should go.

Puppy-bot

To test the system, Coros' team – which also included robotics PhD student Ruta Desai and master's student Ye Yuan – designed several robots and fabricated two of them, one with wheels and a manipulator arm that can hold a pen, and a four legged "puppy"-bot.

"The system makes it easy to experiment with different body proportions and motor configurations, and see how these decisions affect the robot's ability to do certain tasks," said Desai. 

"For instance, we discovered in simulation that some of our preliminary designs for the puppy enabled it to only walk forward, not sideways. We corrected that for the final design. The motions of the robot we actually built matched the desired motion we demonstrated in simulation very well."

Ultimately, the team's goal is to make robotics more accessible to people without a lot of knowledge of the subject. 

"This is important because people who play an active role in creating robotic devices for their own use are more likely to have positive feelings and higher quality interactions with them," said Coros.

"This could accelerate the adoption of robots in everyday life."

• Nasa's next probe set to 'touch the Sun'

Have you ever wished your smartwatch could rotate? 

Me neither, but engineers at Dartmouth College and the University of Waterloo have developed a prototype smartwatch face that can not only rotate, but hinge, translate, rise and orbit too.

"Users want smartwatches that fit their lifestyles and needs," said Xing-Dong Yang, assistant professor of computer science at Dartmouth, who developed the prototype, named "Cito". 

The goal of the project is to improve how smartwatches deliver data to the wearer. As examples, they suggest that a watch could automatically orbit around its strap to keep the face aimed at the user whatever the orientation of the wrist. 

Or it could rise toward a user to alert them of a notification if a user is playing a game, hinge to let someone else look at the face, or slide along an arm to reveal the face if it's hidden under a shirt sleeve.

Exciting dances

Those movements can be performed individually or combined into more exciting dances at will. As well as being purportedly more convenient for users, it's hoped that the technology could deliver benefits to users with physical disabilities or other impairments.

"We recognize that our work investigates a radical idea, but our hope is that we also show how a methodical and principled approach can explore any such radical visions," the research team wrote in a paper that'll be presented at the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Denver, Colorado on 10 May.

"Consumers will question the need for smartwatches if the devices are just not convenient enough," said Yang. 

"Cito proves the true potential of smartwatches and shows that they can be functional and fun."

• The first soft synthetic retina works just like a camera

Human vision depends on the retina. Just like the image sensor in a digital camera, it sits at the back of the eyeball and converts light that falls onto it into electrical signals that are sent to the brain. 

Around the world, however, there are many people with inherited or acquired diseases that damage the retina, damaging sight in the process. In that past, treating them has involved implanting rigid, hard materials that only provide limited benefits.

But now a chemist at Oxford University named Vanessa Restrepo-Schild has used synthetic tissues to develop an artificial retina that more closely resembles human biology. It's made of soft water droplets and biological cell membrane proteins.

Eye environment

Just like the real thing, the cells act like pixels, responding to light and creating electrical signals that could be used to stimulate the neurons at the back of the eye. The soft retina is less invasive than a mechanical device, and less likely therefore to be rejected.

"The human eye is incredibly sensitive, which is why foreign bodies like metal retinal implants can be so damaging, leading to inflammation and/or scarring," said Restrepo-Schild. 

"But a biological synthetic implant is soft and water based, so much more friendly to the eye environment."

Shapes and signals

So far, the retina has only been tested in laboratory conditions and in monochrome. The next step is to see how well it performs as an implant and expand its capability to recognise colours and possibly even shapes and signals.

"I have always been fascinated by the human body," said Restrepo-Schild. 

"I want to prove that current technology can be used to replicate the function of human tissues, without having to actually use living cells."

The full details of the technology were published in a paper in the journal Scientific Reports.

• This prosthetic hand has a built-in eye for added accuracy

There are definitely times - mostly when ferreting around under the sofa or behind the fridge for a lost object - when you've probably wished you had an eye on your hand.

Well, it seems that even the creepiest dreams can come true. Biomedical engineers at Newcastle University have developed a prosthetic hand that's fitted with a camera.

The cool thing isn't just that it has a camera, but that the hand can use that camera to make it easier to pick things up. The goal is to bypass the normal processes which require a prosthetic hand owner to see an object, and then physically stimulate the right muscles in the arm that trigger the movements in the prosthetic limb.

Instead, by taking a picture of an object in front of it, the robotic hand can assess the object's size and shape and trigger the right movements without intervention from the user.

"Prosthetic limbs have changed very little in the past 100 years – the design is much better and the materials’ are lighter weight and more durable but they still work in the same way," said Kianoush Nazarpour, co-author of a paper describing the technology. 

"Using computer vision, we have developed a bionic hand which can respond automatically – in fact, just like a real hand, the user can reach out and pick up a cup or a biscuit with nothing more than a quick glance in the right direction." 

 Neural networks

The system uses neural networks to recognise different objects, and then match them with the kind of grip they require. 

"The computer isn’t just matching an image, it’s learning to recognise objects and group them according to the grasp type the hand has to perform to successfully pick it up," said Ghazal Ghazaei, lead author on the paper.

It's capable of four different kinds of grip - palm wrist neutral (such as when you pick up a cup); palm wrist pronated (such as picking up the TV remote); tripod (thumb and two fingers) and pinch (thumb and first finger). 

“The beauty of this system is that it’s much more flexible and the hand is able to pick up novel objects – which is crucial since in everyday life people effortlessly pick up a variety of objects that they have never seen before,” Nazarpour added.

Ultimately, the goal of the project is to build a bionic hand that can do much more - sensing pressure and temperature, and transmitting that to the brain. The team would also like to allow the brain to control the hand directly, as opposed to connecting to muscles. 

“[The camera-equipped hand] is a stepping stone towards our ultimate goal,” said Nazarpour.  

“But importantly, it’s cheap and it can be implemented soon because it doesn’t require new prosthetics – we can just adapt the ones we have.”

• This new battery concept could give electric cars a 1000km range

One of the biggest challenges when designing an electric car is where to put the batteries. 

Every vehicle has hundreds to thousands of separate battery cells, each surrounded by a housing and connected to the car systems and sensors. This complex design takes up space - more than 50 percent of the area dedicated to batteries inside the car is taken up with housing and contacts.

But now a team of engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Ceramic Technologies and Systems (IKTS) has developed a new battery concept that could substantially decrease the amount of space needed for housing and contacts - meaning more batteries can fit in the same car.

Their system stacks battery cells directly one above the other across a large area, as opposed to the traditional approach where individual cells are strung side-by-side in small sections. The direct connection to each cell in the stack allows current to flow over the entire surface of the battery, significantly reducing electrical resistance.

"With our new packaging concept, we hope to increase the range of electric cars in the medium term up to 1000 kilometers," said Mareike Wolter, Project Manager at Fraunhofer IKTS. 

Metallic tape

The key to being able to do this is a new electrode - in this case, a metallic tape coated on both sides with ceramic storage materials. One side is the battery's anode - the other is the cathode.

Developing each material is a complex process, involving a suspension of powdered ceramics mixed with polymers and electrically conductive materials.

"We use our expertise in ceramic technologies to design the electrodes in such a way that they need as little space as possible, save a lot of energy, are easy to manufacture and have a long life," said Wolter.

The research is still a work-in-progress right now, but the concept is being scaled up to larger battery cells which can be installed in real electric cars. Initial tests are due for 2020, but Wolter is optimistic that this should take place without difficulties:

"One of the core competencies of our institute is to adapt ceramic materials from the laboratory to a pilot scale and to reproduce them reliably," she said. 

• This paleontologist is building interactive 3D dinosaur holograms

 If you've seen any robot try to walk, you'll know that they're not very elegant. The reason is their cumbersome, inefficient gait, optimised to prevent them falling over, as opposed to being honed for speed.

By contrast, humans and animals are able to walk and run swiftly and smoothly, using the absolute minimum of energy. And roboticists want to know why. So PhD student Geert Folkertsma at the University of Twente has built a robotic cheetah that he hopes can help optimise the robots of the future.

"As you might expect of the fastest land animal in the world, the cheetah makes very efficient use of its energy," Folkertsma says. 

“I wanted to create a robot that runs the same way, with the aim of applying this knowledge to the development of new robots." 

The backbone

His cheetah-bot is pretty small - thirty centimetres long - and weighs in at just 2.5kg. That makes it twenty times lighter than the real thing and four times as small. "Not every element is where you would find it in the animal, but the spine, shoulders and hips occupy the same position," said Folkertsma.

Studying video footage of real cheetahs and using software to analyse their movements, Folkertsma was able to figure out what makes the creature so efficient. 

"The main difference between existing walking robots and my cheetah robot is the backbone,” he says.

"The trick was to imitate it without complicating matters unnecessarily: instead of vertebrae and intervertebral discs, we worked with a cleverly placed spring which delivers approximately the same effect. 

"Cheetahs are also able to store a lot of energy in their muscles for later use. This too is something we have imitated by fitting carefully selected springs in our robot’s legs." 

Speed Issue

It doesn't move as fast as you might expect for a robotic cheetah - just one kilometre per hour. The real thing, if it were scaled down to the same size, would run at 20 km/h. But it is able to move using only about 15 percent more energy than the real thing. 

And Folkertsma says he's working on the speed issue. 

"A Master’s student is currently working on a newly developed robotic leg and the first tests, focusing on a single leg, are already promising," he says. 

"With four legs of this type, the robot will be able to run much faster; I think this will help us make genuine advances."
 

• Heat, not electricity, could power computers of the future

 The problem of cooling computers is one of the biggest in the world today. Data centres around the globe spend vast sums on keeping their equipment at the absolute optimum temperature, no matter the conditions outside.

But now a pair of engineers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln have flipped that idea on its head, proposing heat as an alternative to electricity instead.

“If you think about it, whatever you do with electricity you should (also) be able to do with heat, because they are similar in many ways,” said Sidy Ndao, co-author of a paper describing the idea published in Scientific Reports. 

“In principle, they are both energy carriers. If you could control heat, you could use it to do computing and avoid the problem of overheating.” 

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Proof of Concept

 Ndao's lab has developed a nano-thermal-mechanical device - basically a thermal diode - which works at temperatures up to 330C. It's just a proof of concept, not super-efficient yet, but the team believes that it could be used to create a physical computer that can work in environments up to 700C.

“It could be used in space exploration, for exploring the core of the earth, for oil drilling, (for) many applications. It could allow us to do calculations and process data in real time in places where we haven’t been able to do so before,” said Ndao.

What's more, the thermal diode can help to limit the amount of energy that is wasted in computation. "If you could harness this heat and use it for energy in these devices, you could obviously cut down on waste and the cost of energy," he added. 

Future Plans

 There are several improvements that the team wants to make to the device before thinking too much about the future, but Ndao believes there is great potential. 

"Hopefully one day, it will be used to unlock the mysteries of outer space, explore and harvest our own planet’s deep-beneath-the-surface geology, and harness waste heat for more efficient-energy utilization," he said.

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