Solyndra hopes to capture the wasted sunlight falling on roofs by making solar cells into cylinders rather than panels

There are approximately 30 billion square feet (2.8 billion square meters) of expansive, flat roofs in the U.S., an area large enough to collect the sunlight needed to power 16 million American homes, or replace 38 conventional […]

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Man truly took to the air for the first time 105 years ago this December, setting off a chain of innovation that made human flight normal and even made space flight possible.

Robotic drone aircraft that loiter inside the eye of a hurricane for hours or days could improve forecasts (Image: Wipo)
This week New Scientist’s weekly […]

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See a slideshow of images of the new sub
Off the coast of Massachusetts’s Cape Cod on an unseasonably warm autumn day, something resembling a portly yellow dolphin turns on a dime before scooting off in the opposite direction.

The nimble new automated sub, called Odyssey IV, is the baby of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of […]

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Rigid television screens, bulky laptops and still image posters are to be a thing of the past as new research, published in the New Journal of Physics, heralds the beginning of a technological revolution for screen displays.

Screen display technology is taking a significant step forward as researchers from Sony and the Max Planck Institute demonstrate […]

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Using sound to manipulate low-cost liquid lenses could improve the small cameras built into mobile phones, say US researchers.

By taking many photos and combining only the sharp ones, good snaps can be produced from a liquid lens vibrated by sound waves (Image: Nature)
Demand for high-performance cameras – and hence lenses – in consumer gadgets like […]

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New technology would enable turbine tethered to the seabed to harvest energy

There is no market yet for turbines that turn the tides into a source of energy from deep beneath the sea. But that has not stopped mechanical engineers at the University of Strathclyde’s Energy Systems Research Unit (ESRU) in Scotland from developing one that […]

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New miniature image-capturing technology powered by water, sound, and surface tension could lead to smarter and lighter cameras in everything from cell phones and automobiles to autonomous robots and miniature spy planes.

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have designed and tested an adaptive liquid lens that captures 250 pictures per second and requires considerably less energy […]

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In an advance toward introduction of an amazing new kind of internal combustion engine, researchers in China are reporting development and use of a new and more accurate computer model to assess performance of the so-called free-piston linear alternator (FPLA).

A cross-sectional view of the FPLA. (Credit: Qingfeng Li)
Their study of the FPLA, which could provide […]

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Photography entered the digital age in the early 90s and the resulting wave of technical innovation has put cameras everywhere, from satellites to cellphones. But bigger changes in the technology are yet to come.

Thanks to continued advances in software and processing power, research labs are continually exploring new ideas about what cameras and photographs can […]

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University of Utah engineers devised a new way to slice thin wafers of the chemical element germanium for use in the most efficient type of solar power cells. They say the new method should lower the cost of such cells by reducing the waste and breakage of the brittle semiconductor.

The expensive solar cells now are […]

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