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Growing populations and technological advances are driving consumption,using up raw materials,and creating a crisis in waste management.What can we do with the ever-growing volume of obsolete electronics or ‘e-waste’,for example,which will reach 50 million tons by 2021? A large proportion is currently transported to developing countries to be processed,while the rest is stockpiled or sent …

The U.S.may have fallen behind Asia and Europe in battery manufacturing,but a number of well-funded companies are looking to get the country back in the game with a technology that could supersede today’s lithium-ion chemistries. Companies including Ionic Materials,QuantumScape,Sion power and Solid Power are developing all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs) that are expected to be safer and more energy-dense than the lithium-ion products …

What if you could solve two of Earth’s biggest problems in one stroke? UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle plastic waste,such as soda or water bottles,into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage. Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources,such as …

In recent years,researchers have developed a growing amount of computational techniques to enable human-like capabilities in robots.Most techniques developed so far,however,merely focus on artificially reproducing the senses of vision and touch,disregarding other senses,such as auditory perception. A research team at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have recently carried out a study exploring the possibility of using …