It’s spawning a revolution The DIY movement has vaulted from the home to the research lab, and it’s driven by the same motives: saving tons of money and getting precisely what you want. It’s spawning [...]

Educated users that understand, and take an active interest in maintaining their possessions   The Repair It Yourself (RIY) concept by Design Academy Eindhoven graduate Eugenia Morpurgo is a canvas shoe designed to be as [...]

What’s the Big Idea?   Less than one hundred years ago a routine bacterial infection could be a death sentence. The discovery of penicillin changed all of that. We’re now on the verge of a [...]

Stronger than steel or titanium — and just as tough — metallic glass is an ideal material for everything from cell-phone cases to aircraft parts. Now, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have [...]

After six years of intensive effort, scientists are reporting development of the first commercially viable nanogenerator, a flexible chip that can use body movements — a finger pinch now en route to a pulse beat [...]

  Researchers have demonstrated a penny-sized “nuclear battery” that produces energy from the decay of radioisotopes. As radioactive substances decay, they release charged particles that when properly harvested can create an electrical current. Nuclear batteries [...]

Image by Marco Veringa via Flickr Wine glasses that don’t shatter? Baby bottles that don’t break? Coffee mugs that last generations? All are possible with a new process for strengthening glass and ceramics developed by [...]

A mid-life crisis threatens its future

Uni-Pixel, a company based in Woodlands, Texas, has announced it is about to start mass production of a thin-film to be used in time-multiplexed optical shutter (TMOS) displays, a next-generation display technology that exploits retinal [...]

Wal-Mart and others are going green with “biodegradable” packaging made from corn. But is this really the answer to America’s throwaway culture?