Design News

Walter Benjamin came up with aura and authenticity in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" in 1936 to describe the value of original artworks created by artists instead of mechanical copies. He wanted to defend artificiality and support traditional fine arts.

Almost all of the clothing sold in America comes from overseas, making a long journey on a shipping container into a domestic port. Peer inside any apparel shipment bound for customs checkpoints, groaning with t-shirts or leggings or underwear, and you'll probably see tags hinting at their origins: Made in Vietnam, China, Indonesia.

By reinforcing concrete with textiles instead of steel, it is possible to use less material and create slender, lightweight structures with a significantly lower environmental impact. The technology to utilize carbon fiber textiles already exists, but it has been challenging, among other things, to produce a basis for reliable calculations for complex and vaulted structures.

Small-scale solar power, also known as rooftop or distributed solar, has grown considerably in the U.S. over the past decade. It provides electricity without emitting air pollutants or climate-warming greenhouse gases, and it meets local energy demand without requiring costly investments in transmission and distribution systems.

Researchers at the University of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology recently developed Granulobot, a new modular robotic system that can change its physical shape to best navigate different environments.

A novel mixed light field technique that utilizes a mix of ray-controlled ambient lighting with projection mapping (PM) to obtain PM in bright surroundings has been developed by scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology. This innovative technology utilizes a novel kaleidoscope array to achieve ray-controlled lighting and a binary search algorithm for removing ambient lighting from PM targets. It provides an immersive augmented reality experience with applications in various fields.

A research team led by Prof. Ni Yong and Prof. He Linghui from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a new composite glass combining the nacre-inspired structure and shear stiffening gel (SSG) material, maintaining transparency while exhibiting excellent thermal insulation and impact resistance. Their work was published in Advanced Materials.

For the first time, load-bearing structures like bridges and shelters can be made with origami modules—versatile components that can fold compactly and adapt into different shapes—University of Michigan engineers have demonstrated.

Soft robots use pliant materials such as elastomers to interact safely with the human body and other challenging, delicate objects and environments. A team of Rice University researchers has developed an analytical model that can predict the curing time of platinum-catalyzed silicone elastomers as a function of temperature. The model could help reduce energy waste and improve throughput for elastomer-based component manufacturing.

Auke Ijspeert and his team in the BioRobotics Lab (BioRob) in EPFL's School of Engineering had operated their bio-informed robots in natural environments before, but this was more for demonstration purposes than for scientific rigor. Tests of robotic function were usually carried out in the lab, for example, using X-ray videos to compare robotic movements with the animals that inspired their design.

The iPhone already offers the best camera you'll always have in your pocket, but ShiftCam's range of lenses makes the best even better in most cases.

Astropad's Rock Paper Pencil is a textured screen protector and a replacement Apple Pencil tip that should be part of every artist's toolbox.

Fresh off the release of Disney Illusion Island, AJ Grand-Scrutton talks to Shacknews about the history of Dlala Studios.

At the 2024 European Robotics Forum taking place in Rimini, Italy, researchers of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT- Italian Institute of Technology) have shown the most recent results from the project SOPHIA: A collaborative robot to guide workers and relieve the burden of overhead tasks such as drilling, wearable robots to support the lifting and carrying of heavy loads physically, and wearable feedback devices to alert users about awkward postures.

To discourage the inefficient manual invention and configuration of new metaheuristic optimization algorithms, a research team at IRIDIA, the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, studied the literature and outlined the strengths of automatic approaches to the design of metaheuristics, especially compared to the many redundant—and at times outlandish—metaphor-based metaheuristics.

Big? Yes. Difficult? Nah. With only basic woodworking skills, a tablesaw, and a few simple tools, you can make custom cabinets for your home or shop.

There are a variety of materials that you can use for your kitchen cabinets, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. The most popular material is: When trying to work out the right material for your kitchen, it is beneficial to be guided by professionals. They can direct you on what is best industry practice […]

Small wearable or implantable electronics could help monitor our health, diagnose diseases, and provide opportunities for improved, autonomous treatments. But to do this without aggravating or damaging the cells around them, these electronics will need to not only bend and stretch with our tissues as they move, but also be soft enough that they will not scratch and damage tissues.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden have developed a new truck front concept to reduce fatal crashes in car-truck collisions significantly.

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