A supercapacitor – a device that can unleash large amounts of charge very quickly – has been created using printing technology for the first time. The advance will pave the way for “printed” power supplies that could be useful as gadgets become thinner, lighter and even flexible.

The problems with batteries are that they are very heavy, they don’t last very long, they are slow to charge, and they don’t give out the power fast enough for the very high power need to drive propellers for instance. These factors have always been a big problem especially with electric cars. There are already commercially available super efficient, high power / high speed electric motors capable of amazing performance, but the batteries available will not take nearly enough power to go any length of journey.

Advances in electronics mean portable gadgets are shrinking in size but growing in their energy demands, and conventional batteries are struggling to cope. The supercapacitor has a power density of 70 kilowatts per kilogram to allow rapid charging and discharging. The energy density is 9 watt hours per kilogram, meaning 1 kilogram holds around 32 kilojoules.

Recent work at MIT’s Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) offers the most economically viable alternative to conventional batteries in more than 200 years. The Ultracapacitor is both a battery and a capacitor.

Ultracapacitors could allow laptops and cell phones to be charged in a minute. Unlike laptop batteries, which start to lose their ability to hold a charge after a year or two (several hundred charge/discharge cycles), ultracapacitors have hundreds of thousands of charge/discharge cycles and could still be going strong long after the device is obsolete.

You may know of Steve Potter at the Laboratory for NeuroEngineering at Emory and Georgia Tech who is most notably famous for his Hybrots (hybrid robots). Hybrid robots refer to artificial animals (part animal part robot - also including animal like robots and robots that behave like animals) that are controlled neurally. Where he grows neural circuits in petri dishes and hooks them up to the sensors and actuators of robots.

Well we’ve been hearing chatter about hybrots being taken to the next level. Most notably, how Charles Higgins from the University of Arizona has been tapping into the spinal cord of dragonflies and using them as extremely powerful sensors for his robots. The primary study being on “mixing biology and electronics to create robotic vision.”

This appears to be a very interesting field to study: integrating biological parts with electronic ones. The possibilities for the use of organic parts in machinery are endless: super-smelling warning bots that can sense any dangerous chemical, gas or oil leaks in critical situations, or rescue bots with a sense of smell that can lead them directly to a trapped survivor. Whatever the future uses and regardless of possible ramifications, for a dragonfly to be synched up with machines is quite a feat to accomplish and all-around amazing!

“researchers at North Carolina State University are mimicking nature’s small flyers – and developing robotic bats that offer increased maneuverability and performance.”

This is only another step towards more innovative mechanical designs mimicking real life animals and organisms. There have already been numerous strides made in optimizing our electronically designed systems by merging them with the advantageous design of nature.

The skeleton of the robotic bat uses shape-memory metal alloy that is super-elastic for the joints, and smart materials that respond to electric current for the muscular system. Kinda like in the Batman movie where the fabric tightens when an induced electrical current it applied to it.

So check it out! - ScienceDaily

Ever wonder what the future has in store? Well the discovery channel has an entire program devoted to showing what advances are being made and what effect they’ll have on the future. So take a look:

Nokia, has harnessed the power of a phone that can recharge itself constantly based off olf ambient radio waves that travel through the air.

It takes all the waves from TV, radio, and other free-floating wireless signals that just bounce around the air and are either wasted, absorbed or scattered and converts the electromagnetic energy into electrical current which can then recharge the phone’s battery.

Currently Nokia is able to harvest all of 5 milliwatts from the air; the goal is to increase that to 20 milliwatts in the short term and 50 milliwatts down the line. That wouldn’t be enough to keep the phone alive during an active call, but would be enough to slowly recharge the cell phone battery while it’s in standby mode, theoretically offering infinite power — provided you’re not stuck deep underground where radio waves can’t penetrate.

There’s a new invisibility cloak for sound that could not only help doctors find tiny tumors but could also hide submarines from enemy sonar. And this same technology could also be used to create high-def ultrasound pictures or detect tiny tumors that can’t be found by today’s conventional methods.

The way it works is by bending acoustics waves before they can hit a surface and guiding them smoothly around the object. For instance, you would be able to bend sonar around a submarine so that it can’t be detected a enemy. Invisibility cloaks, whether for sound or light, both manipulate waves.

Whatever the wave type, the principle is basically the same; bend a wave around an object without breaking it. The cloak is supposedly to be made out of sonic metamaterial that uses cubes and octagons to create holes that can then bend the wave around the covered object. The most obvious application would be as a coating for submarines that want to avoid detection from enemy sonar.

We’ve also heard chatter that there have been some advances in light invisibly cloaks. As you can see in the picture it maskes the person thats standing there. But in fact this isn’t a true invisible cloak at all. In the image, there is a camera behind the person that films the scene and then a projector shines that real-time movie onto the person’s jacket thus creating a sort of optical illusion.

However, it only works in 2D thus defeating the whole ‘noone can see me’ since someone at a different angle (such as from the otherside) will clearly be able to see the person standing there. But despite this…diappointment, it does show that there are strides being made in the development of invisibility apparatuses that one day may in fact hide us from those we wish to avoid.

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