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THE ORIGINAL COLLECTION · SINCE 2010

Engineering
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Research announcements from universities, hospitals and scientific institutions. Explore the stories, people and discoveries behind the headlines.

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Engineering

Tiny and powerful – metamaterial lenses for your phones and drones

A new approach to manufacturing multicolour lenses could inspire a new generation of tiny, cheap, and powerful optics for portable devices such as phones and drones. The design uses layers of metamaterials to simultaneously focus a range of wavelengths from an unpolarised source and over a large diameter, overcoming a major limitation of metalenses, said the first author of the paper reporting the design, Mr Joshua Jordaan, from the Research School of Physics at the Australian National University and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS). “Our design has a lot of nice features ...

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Engineering

3D printing “glue gun” can generate bone grafts directly onto fractures in animals

Scientists have developed a tool made from a modified glue gun that can 3D print bone grafts directly onto fractures and defects during surgery. The tool, described September 5th in the Cell Press journal Device, has been tested in rabbits to quickly create complex bone implants without the need for prefabricating in advance. What’s more, the team optimized the 3D-printed grafts for high structural flexibility, release of anti-inflammatory antibiotics, and promotion of natural bone regrowth at the grafting site. Historically, bone implants have been made of metal, donor ...

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Engineering

The promise and tradeoffs of the 'drone revolution' in modern agriculture

In a Policy Forum, Ben Belton and colleagues discuss the rapidly growing use of drone technology in agricultural applications and the important, yet understudied, benefits and trade-offs involved. “There are strong indications that drones can raise the efficiency and productivity of farming, improve worker safety, and enhance rural livelihoods, but these impacts have yet to be evaluated rigorously,” Belton et al. write. “Applied interdisciplinary research and corresponding policy responses are urgently needed to steer the global ...

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Engineering

New design framework makes it easier to create custom shock-absorbing materials

MADISON — University of Wisconsin–Madison mechanical engineers have developed a comprehensive framework that accelerates improvements to shock-absorbing foam materials. The materials have an array of uses ranging from sports or military helmet liners to struts that cushion a spacecraft landing. “We’ve developed a novel design framework to help designers create a shock-absorbing material of a specific geometry that does exactly what they want it to do without adding weight or ...

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Engineering

Mechanical forces drive evolutionary change

To the point: Small fold – big role: A tissue fold known as the cephalic furrow, an evolutionary novelty that forms between the head and the trunk of fly embryos, plays a mechanical role in stabilizing embryonic tissues during the development of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Combining theory and experiment: Researchers integrated computer simulations with their experiments and showed that the timing and position of cephalic furrow formation are crucial for its function, preventing mechanical instabilities in the embryonic tissues. Evolutionary response ...

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Engineering

Flexible, skin-mounted haptic interface can seamlessly bridge virtual and real-world experiences

Immersing oneself in the virtual and augmented reality world is not only awesome for entertainment, it helps industries like manufacturing and medicine operate more efficiently. Nevertheless, as fast as the technology brings you into the world, the weight and stiffness of its hardware can just as easily remind you that you aren’t really golfing on the PGA tour or preparing for a surgery. Inspired by Softbotics, researchers in the Soft Machines Lab at Carnegie Mellon University are developing wearable electronics to augment our senses with ...

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Engineering

Researchers use seaweed to manufacture raw materials for civil construction

Brazilian researchers have developed a ceramic clay that is lighter than that normally used in civil construction by adding algae from the Sargassum genus to the manufacturing process. These brown algae, also known as sargassum, are common in the central Atlantic Ocean. However, they have been washing up in large quantities on beaches in the Caribbean, the United States, and northern Brazil, where they have become problematic. Their accumulation on beaches can harm human health due to the gases emitted during decomposition, as well as damage tourism, fishing, ...

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Engineering

New Hebrew SeniorLife affordable senior housing building achieves Phius Certification

Hebrew SeniorLife, a Harvard Medical School–affiliated nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the lives of older adults, has announced that its 108 Centre Street affordable senior housing building, located on the Center Communities of Brookline campus, has officially received Phius Certification for its high-performance, energy-efficient design. The seven-story, all-electric multifamily building provides 54 affordable apartments for seniors and significantly advances sustainable, healthy housing for older adults in Greater Boston. “Achieving Phius Certification reinforces our commitment not only to affordability and community, but also to environmental responsibility ...

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Engineering

"Fatigue" strengthen steels

A NIMS research team has discovered a unique phenomenon that the fatigue limit of steel is improved by prior cyclic deformation (fatigue) training. Based on this finding, the research team developed a novel “pre-fatigue training” technique, which successfully doubled the fatigue limit of high-strength steel by suppressing crack initiation. This strategy offers a versatile approach to improving fatigue limit in general steels, providing an effective alternative to tempering heat treatment that inevitably sacrifices tensile strength. ...

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Engineering

OET inaugural cover | 30 years of nanoimprint lithography: Leading the new era of nanomanufacturing

Professor L. Jay Guo’s group from the University of Michigan published a comprehensive review titled “30 years of nanoimprint: development, momentum and prospects” in the inaugural issue of Opto-Electronic Technology, systematically summarizing key developments and future trends in NIL, with a special focus on industry advancements in nano-Si device manufacturing and nanophotonics. The review elaborates extensively on two main NIL methods: thermal NIL (T-NIL) and UV NIL (UV-NIL), examining ...

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Engineering

Urban civilization rose in Southern Mesopotamia on the back of tides

Woods Hole, Mass. (August 20, 2025) -- A newly published study challenges long-held assumptions about the origins of urban civilization in ancient Mesopotamia, suggesting that the rise of Sumer was driven by the dynamic interplay of rivers, tides, and sediments at the head of the Persian Gulf. Published today in PLOS ONE, the study, Morphodynamic Foundations of Sumer, is led by Liviu Giosan, Senior Scientist Emeritus in Geology & Geophysics at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and Reed Goodman, Assistant Professor of Environmental Social Science at Baruch Institute of Social Ecology and Forest Science (BICEFS), Clemson ...

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Engineering

Saving bees with ‘superfoods’ – engineered supplement boosts colony reproduction

UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL 16:00 BST / 11:00 ET WEDNESDAY 20 AUGUST 2025 More images available to download via the link in the notes section A new study led by the University of Oxford in collaboration with Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, University of Greenwich, and the Technical University of Denmark could provide a cost-effective and sustainable solution to help tackle the devastating decline in honeybees. An engineered food supplement, designed to provide essential compounds found in plant pollen, was found to significantly enhance colony reproduction. The results have been published today (20 August) in the journal Nature. The challenge: addressing ...

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Engineering

Industry managed forests more likely to fuel megafires

The odds of high-severity wildfire were nearly one-and-a-half times higher on industrial private land than on publicly owned forests, a new study found. Forests managed by timber companies were more likely to exhibit the conditions that megafires love—dense stands of regularly spaced trees with continuous vegetation connecting the understory to the canopy. The research, led by the University of Utah, University of California, Berkeley, and the United States Forest Service, is the first to identify how extreme weather conditions and forest management practices jointly impact fire severity.Leveraging ...

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Engineering

Targeting high agility aviation electro-mechanical actuation: ADRC emerges as key to high-dynamic servo drives

With the rapid development of electrified transportation, there has been a growing demand for high-dynamic and high-precision Electro-Mechanical Actuation (EMA) servo drives in the aviation field. However, EMA applications face more severe multi-source disturbances than industrial servo drives. This issue has received extensive attention in the aviation field. Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC) is a novel control structure that employs disturbance suppression. ADRC does not rely on an accurate model, exhibiting robustness to uncertainties. Recently, ...

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Engineering

Thin films, big science: FSU chemists expand imaging possibilities with new X-ray material

Most people picture a doctor checking for a broken bone when they think of an X-ray. But the technology is just as important in places like airport security, manufacturing, quality control and scientific research, each with its own criteria for size and shape. A team led by Florida State University Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Biwu Ma has developed a new form for X-ray materials that can meet the needs of large-area applications, changing out complex crystal structures for an adaptable and scalable thin-film detector. The work was published in Angewandte Chemie. “We took a material we developed and made it better,” Ma said. “This ...

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Engineering

From static to smart: HIT researchers developed programmable 4D-printed metamaterials that think, change, and perform multiple tasks

Imagine a single piece of material that can change its shape, stiffness, and function—on demand—like a Swiss Army knife made of plastic. That's what researchers at the Harbin Institute of Technology have created with their new 4D-printed "smart" metamaterials, capable of reprogramming themselves for different tasks without any extra tools or infrastructure. Reported in in the International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, these multi-material, multi-responsive, multi-shape shape memory polymer (SMP) gradient metamaterials ...

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Engineering

Specially adapted drones successfully use a "tap and go" approach to apply monitoring tags to whales, speeding up the process and avoiding human interference

Specially adapted drones successfully use a "tap and go" approach to apply monitoring tags to whales, speeding up the process and avoiding human interference Article URL: http://plos.io/4meypZo Article title: Drone-based application of whale tags: A “tap-and-go” approach for scientific animal-borne investigations Author countries: U.S., Dominica, Canada Funding: This study was financially supported by Project CETI (https://www.projectceti.org) via Dalio Philanthropies (https://www.daliophilanthropies.org), OceanX (https://oceanx.org), Sea Grape ...

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Engineering

Up to $5.2 million in federal funds will enable WashU to develop new biomanufacturing capabilities

By Leah Shaffer The process of biomanufacturing requires engineering microbes to produce useful chemicals and materials from carbon neutral processes. But current biomanufacturing cannot get beyond small production scale unless it can outcompete big oil. The petrochemical industry produces chemicals and material building blocks at a low cost because these processes can run nonstop. However, performing microbial biomanufacturing continuously faces numerous challenges and presents a significant hurdle for economically viable bioproduction. At the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, researchers are ...

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Engineering

New quality control for ‘wonder material’ graphene oxide is cheapest and fastest yet

Scientists have created new way to characterise graphene oxide (GO) cheaper and quicker than ever before, helping get the emerging technology out of the lab and into the market. Researchers at King’s College London have designed an ‘interactional fingerprinting’ method that creates a unique identity of individual samples. By mimicking humans’ sense of taste and smell, the method can create a qualitative snapshot of the material without relying on inaccessible gold-standard measurement machinery manned by teams of specialists. By promising a faster and cheaper way to quality control graphene oxide, the scientists ...

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Engineering

Getting sticky: The highest-performing underwater adhesive hydrogel polymer

Hydrogels are a permeable soft material consisting of polymer networks and water with applications ranging from bio-medical engineering to contact lenses. Intrinsic to hydrogels is the ability to endow diverse characteristics by modifying their polymer networks. Professor Gong’s research lab at WPI-ICReDD, Hokkaido University, specializes in hydrogel technology and has engineered hydrogels with self-strengthening, self-healing, underwater adhesion properties and more. For adhesive hydrogels, achieving instant, strong, and repeatable underwater adhesion is a prevailing challenge. Through a combination of data mining and machine learning, Professor Gong, Professor Takigawa, Professor ...

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Engineering

New system dramatically speeds the search for polymer materials

Cambridge, MA – Scientists often seek new materials derived from polymers. Rather than starting a polymer search from scratch, they save time and money by blending existing polymers to achieve desired properties. But identifying the best blend is a thorny problem. Not only is there a practically limitless number of potential combinations, but polymers interact in complex ways, so the properties of a new blend are challenging to predict. To accelerate the discovery of new materials, MIT researchers ...

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Engineering

Using alcohol to reduce the costs of industrial water electrolysis

Hybrid water electrolysis (HWE) is an emerging field that aims to overcome some of the limitations of conventional water electrolysis (CWE) for the production of green hydrogen. In CWE, two reactions take place at each of the electrodes (anode and cathode): one reaction produces hydrogen at the cathode (the hydrogen evolution reaction) and the other produces oxygen at the anode (the oxygen evolution reaction, OER). The concept of hybrid water electrolysis revolves around replacing the anode reaction of CWE (the OER), which is inefficient and requires ...

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Engineering

Columbia Engineering researchers turn dairy byproduct into tissue repair gel

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have established a framework for the design of bioactive injectable hydrogels formulated with extracellular vesicles (EVs) for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine applications. Published today in Matter, Santiago Correa, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, and his collaborators describe an injectable hydrogel platform that uses EVs from milk to address longstanding barriers in the development of biomaterials for regenerative medicine. EVs are particles naturally secreted by cells and carry hundreds of biological ...

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Engineering

Utah engineers develop novel material that efficiently removes ‘forever chemicals’

University of Utah researchers have developed a material that addresses an urgent environmental challenges: the efficient removal and real-time detection of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a toxic and persistent member of the PFAS “forever chemicals” family, from contaminated water. In an industry-funded study published in the Journal of Materials Chemistry C, Ling Zang, professor in the John and Marcia Price College of Engineering’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and his research team introduced a dual-functional metal-organic framework (MOF) known as UiO-66-N(CH₃)₃⁺, a zirconium-based material known ...

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Engineering

Advancing earthquake prediction with an unmanned aerial vehicle

Tokyo, Japan - Megathrust earthquakes are large earthquakes that occur on faults found along the boundaries between tectonic plates. The Nankai Trough is a megathrust earthquake zone lying off the southwestern coast of Japan, and experts estimate that this zone could generate a potentially devastating (magnitude 8 or 9) large earthquake sometime in the next 30 years. In addition to the direct catastrophic impact of such powerful ground shaking, a seismic event of this magnitude could trigger cascading ...

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