News by Subject Technology & Engineering

By electrically stimulating nerves, neuromodulation therapies can reduce epileptic seizures, soothe chronic pain, and treat depression and a host of other health conditions without the use of conventional drugs like opioids. Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison biomedical engineers and their collaborators have made a significant advance that could dramatically reduce the cost of neuromodulation therapy, increase its reliability and make it much less invasive.

The storage of energy for long periods of time is subject to special challenges. An IIASA researcher proposes using a combination of Mountain Gravity Energy Storage (MGES) and hydropower as a solution for this issue.

Chemical engineers at EPFL have developed a new method for atomic layer deposition, a technique commonly used in high-quality microelectronics. The new method can be used in materials with larger surfaces much more cheaply than current approaches, while preserving quality and efficiency.

Researchers from Nuremberg and Erlangen has set a new record for the power conversion efficiency of organic photovoltaic modules. The scientists from Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, the Bavarian Center for Applied Energy Research, and the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy, a branch of Forschungszentrum Jülich, in cooperation with the South China University of Technology, designed an OPV module with an efficiency of 12.6% over an area of 26 square centimeters.

Social media is a rich vein of data for researchers to discover important trends in human environmental behaviour. But analysing this staggering quantity of data is a major challenge -- until now.

ETH Zurich scientists have developed cube-shaped magnetic building blocks that can be assembled into two-dimensional shapes and controlled by an external magnetic field. They can be used for soft robotics applications.

Researchers at Linköping University and RISE, Campus Norrköping, have shown for the first time that it is possible to print complete integrated circuits with more than 100 organic electrochemical transistors. The result has been published in Nature Communications.