Tag Archives: smart materials

Sutures have been used for thousands of years by all civilisation. We have testimony of sutures using vegetable fibres, even sutures using the claws of some type of insects. Of course, modern medicine is no longer using these “natural” materials having been able to leverage on much better materials created …

The digital cameras embedded in smartphones have made incredible progresses, killing point and shoot cameras and now getting close to kill reflex cameras. The quality of the photos has improved thanks to electronics (better digital sensors and faster processing chip) and to software (computational photography). What has seen very little …

For quite some time the focus of researchers working on creating an artificial hand/limb has been on functionality, and rightly so. How can we create an artificial hand that can be controlled by the person’s brain via the stump? Researchers have discovered that the brain of a person with an …

17. Brain Computer Interfaces The connection of our brain to a computer was in a way imprinted in the name that many gave to the earlier ideas of computers: “Electronic Brains”. If they are both “brains” it makes sense to look for a connection among them: easier said than done. …

If you open the hood of your car you’ll see, among many other parts, the battery. Take an electric car and you’ll see plenty of batteries. Researchers and engineers have been at work for a while to remove those batteries and embedding them into the car’s chassis and the bodywork …

Harnessing the Fourth Industrial Revolution We are already in the path of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the one characterised by a merging of the physical, digital and -at least for some- biological world. Personally I tend to limit the characterisation to the merging of physical and digital leaving the merging …

We have already moved quite a long way from Henry Ford’s famous statement: “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” He didn’t actually wanted to limit customer’s choice, he wanted to produce a car that could be affordable for (mostly) …

The early success of personal computers among hobbyists was driven by actuators that converted bits into sound or light. At industrial level the conversion of bits into printouts and into commands operating a lathe or other tools was the reason for their adoption. Actually, it is this conversion of bit/data …

The advance in smart material technologies includes the capability of self replication. Studies in this area started in the last decade and exploited the results of Nature: using DNA strings with attached molecules of materials scientists demonstrated the possibility of replication (see the image). Of course the replication instructions to …

In the last ten years there have been several researches focussing on the creation of a sensory system for robots that could be as effective as the one of animals. Animals have a variety of sensorial capabilities, varying in different species. Most species (probably all) have touch sensors embedded in …