Enlarge / Look at this lovely cube-shaped piece of poo, courtesy of the Australian bare-nosed wombat. (credit: Patricia J. Yang et al., 2021) Scientists have been puzzling for decades over how the Australian bare-nosed wombat poops out neat little cubes of feces instead of tapered cylinders like pretty much all other animals. According to a new […]
Enlarge (credit: StoreDot) Building a better battery requires dealing with problems in materials science, chemistry, and manufacturing. We do regular coverage of work going on in the former two categories, but we get a fair number of complaints about our inability to handle the third: figuring out how companies manage to take solutions to the […]
Enlarge For applications like robotics, there’s usually a clear division of labor between the processors that control the robot’s body and the actuators that actually control the physical changes of that body. But a new paper being released today blurs the lines between the two, using a magnetic switch in a way that both stores […]
Enlarge / The output of two optical frequency combs, showing the light appearing at evenly spaced wavelengths. (credit: ESO) AI and machine-learning techniques have become a major focus of everything from cloud computing services to cell phone manufacturers. Unfortunately, our existing processors are a bad match for the sort of algorithms that many of these […]
Enlarge / A housewife proudly presents her indispensable Pyrex kitchenware (1955). Ainissa Ramirez tells the story of its invention, and how it molded human behavior in turn, in her book, The Alchemy of Us. (credit: Chaloner Woods/Getty Images) There’s rarely time to write about every cool science-y story that comes our way. So this year, […]
Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia Commons) Most of the disposable batteries you’ll come across are technically termed alkaline batteries. They work at high pH and typically use zinc as the charge carrier. Zinc is great because it’s very cheap, can be used to make one of the two electrodes, and, in the right context, allows the use […]
Enlarge / An experimental satellite, not made of wood, that was used to test ideas for orbital junk removal. (credit: NASA) We here at Ars were somewhat surprised to stumble across a BBC headline indicating that a university-industry partnership in Japan was working on developing wooden satellites. The plan is less insane than it sounds—wood […]
Expand / / One club, just two behaviours. ) Right now, our chips are made on silicon. But basic limits on what could be accomplished with that substance contains investigators eyeing ways to utilize substances that have inherently smaller features, such as nanotubes or even atomically thin stuff. At least in concept, these can let […]
A little U.K. startup has created an algorithm which greatly lowers the degree of calculating power required to run a metric which may pave the way for creation of new materials. Researchers from the business, Phasecraft, together with researchers in the University of Bristol, revealed {} issue from quantum physics– even just one that’s too […]
Expand / / Workers type plastic waste for a swimmer transfers plastic waste in Yongin Recycling Center at Yongin, South Korea. (charge: Bloomberg/Getty Pictures ) A couple of decades ago, it seemed just like plastic recycling was made to develop into an integral element of a sustainable future. Afterward, the purchase price of fossil fuels […]