Tag: Fall2016

From mushrooms to spider silk, engineers and entrepreneurs are taking inspiration from nature to make greener materials that perform virtually as well as conventional products. As consumers increasingly expect businesses to show an environmental ethic, nature-based materials will grow in demand and their inventors will profit.

The speed with which robots and software are becoming more intelligent and more capable threatens to eliminate humans’ jobs ranging from manufacturing to accounting to journalism and the law. But in a Ford Motor Co. plant in Cologne, Germany, robots and people have found a way to co-exist. The plant uses specially designed “co-bots” to...

The “co-bot” idea is under consideration at several manufacturing companies as a way to move more gently into a future in which robots outperform, and eventually replace, humans on the job.  

Time to let go of lithium-ion batteries and get ready for lighter, longer-lasting lithium-air cells – especially now that a research team at MIT has figured out how to make them even lighter and get far more energy from them. Lithium-air batteries “inhale” air to use oxygen as part of their electrical reactions, eliminating the...

Lithium technology will continue to dominate the battery industry but configurations are changing. A challenge for research will be to create new batteries compatible with existing devices.