Future Innovations

Inflatable structures are all around us, from pool floaties and archways at the Tour de France to life-saving emergency resuscitators and vehicle airbags. As useful as these structures are, they are limited to only two […]

Arco Bast studies how neurons communicate. Earlier this year, the Janelia postdoc encountered a more mechanical version of the same problem: The components of his custom microscope could not easily communicate with one another.This post […]

Inside every electronic device, the flow of electricity is controlled by a switch called a transistor. For decades, these switches were made from silicon. More recently, engineers have turned to a material called gallium nitride […]

While it may sound like science fiction, earbuds that read brain activity are already on sale. Wearable technology company Neurable claims that its headphones, equipped with electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, can track your fatigue and reduce […]

Modern cameras can capture an extraordinary amount of detail, producing images made up of millions of pixels that reveal textures, edges and colors invisible to earlier generations of digital photography. In poor lighting conditions, however, […]

Many AI technologies depend on accurately reconstructing dynamic 3D environments, from self-driving vehicles to immersive virtual reality. However, representing the wide variety of motions found in real-world scenes remains a fundamental challenge because no single […]

Metals, semiconductors and insulators are fundamental components of modern electronics. However, efforts to improve device performance have largely focused on semiconductor quality, while metal crystallinity has received far less attention.This post was originally published on […]

For major tech companies and aerospace firms, space may be the next frontier for data centers. With public opinion of data centers declining amid rising concerns about power infrastructure, water scarcity and environmental degradation, deploying […]

A hiker is lost in the forest, and winter weather is setting in. The search needs to be speedy, thorough and efficient. Searchers send out an autonomous robotic drone. But how does it know where […]

A research team has developed a flexible near-infrared (NIR) photodetector that delivers photoresponsivity more than five times higher while maintaining its performance under repeated bending. The technology is expected to serve as a core platform […]