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Imagine a material that does not need to be tuned to one particular vibration frequency to harvest energy. Whether it is pushed, pulled, shaken, or hit with a sudden disturbance, the material could capture the incoming energy, guide it to a specific location, and convert part of it into useful electrical power. Researchers Hwang and Arrieta have proposed a remarkable approach based on nonlinear metamaterials and transition waves . Their work shows how a one-dimensional chain of specially designed bistable elements could potentially transmit, concentrate, store, and harvest mechanical energy in a way that is largely independent of the frequency or strength of the incoming excitation. The concept could eventually lead to structures that not only protect buildings and infrastructure from extreme events but also recover some of the energy produced by those events. The Problem With Conventional Vibration Energy Harvesting Vibration-based energy harvesting is not a new idea. Researchers have...

As the global population continues to grow, two challenges are becoming increasingly important: finding sustainable sources of energy and improving human health. Researchers are now exploring technologies that can address both problems at the same time. One promising approach comes from triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) —small devices that can convert everyday mechanical movements into electrical energy. In a recent study, Yupeng Mao and his team developed a flexible, lightweight system that not only harvests energy from human movement but also uses that energy to monitor exercise and identify incorrect movement techniques. The result is a self-powered wireless motion correction system that could potentially make wearable health-monitoring technology more convenient, sustainable, and intelligent. Turning Human Movement Into Electricity Everyday activities such as walking, bending, stretching, clapping, and exercising involve mechanical energy. Most of this energy is simply lost to...

In a major step toward the future of intelligent healthcare, a medical team in China has successfully completed what has been described as the world’s first AI-powered, ultrasound robot-guided procedure for treating congenital heart disease . The procedure was performed on a 48-year-old man on Saturday by specialists from the Senior Department of Cardiology at the Sixth Medical Center of Chinese PLA General Hospital, commonly known as 301 Hospital . The achievement could represent an important shift in minimally invasive heart surgery. Instead of using robotics simply to help doctors control surgical instruments, the new system combines artificial intelligence, medical imaging and robotic navigation , allowing the technology to assist with both understanding what is happening inside the heart and guiding the procedure in real time. A New Kind of Surgical Robot Robotic technology is already being used in medicine, including cardiovascular procedures. However, many existing interventio...

For decades, materials scientists have faced a frustrating problem: making a material strong and stiff without making it brittle. Usually, when a material becomes stronger and stiffer, it loses its ability to stretch or deform without breaking. On the other hand, materials that can stretch significantly are often too soft or weak to withstand large forces. Now, researchers led by James Surjadi have developed a new type of mechanical metamaterial that could help overcome this long-standing trade-off. Inspired by the unusual structure of double-network hydrogels , the researchers created a metamaterial that combines two different structural networks—a stiff truss network and a flexible woven network. The result is remarkable: the new architecture can achieve a tenfold improvement in both stiffness and stretchability compared with its individual components . Even more surprisingly, the researchers discovered that deliberately introducing defects into the structure can make it absorb sign...

Imagine a computer that performs calculations without traditional electronic circuits, transistors, or semiconductor chips. Instead of electrical signals moving through microscopic components, its logic could be controlled by soft mechanical structures that physically change shape . That idea is becoming closer to reality. Researchers led by Nan Yang have developed a new approach to mechanical computing based on bistable soft shells —flexible structures that can switch between two stable shapes. By controlling these shape changes, the researchers created mechanical versions of fundamental logic gates and combined them into a programmable computing system . The work could open a new path toward computers that operate in environments where conventional electronics may struggle. A Computer Made From Mechanical Motion Modern computers rely on electronic logic gates such as AND, OR and NOT gates. These tiny circuits process binary information, where signals represent either 0 or 1 . Mechan...

Black holes are often imagined as enormous objects formed when massive stars collapse. But physics allows something far stranger: a black hole so small that its initial mass could be comparable to that of a loaded truck. A new theoretical study suggests that, under the right conditions, a black hole weighing only about 40 metric tons could form inside a compact star and continue growing rather than disappearing. The surprising ingredient that could make this possible is dark matter . The idea connects three mysterious areas of modern physics: black holes, dark matter and the extreme environments inside neutron stars and white dwarfs. Why Tiny Black Holes Should Disappear In 1974, physicist Stephen Hawking showed that black holes are not completely black. Because of quantum effects near their event horizons, they can slowly release energy in the form of what is now called Hawking radiation . As a black hole loses energy, it also loses mass. And the smaller the black hole becomes, the ...

Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System, but its interior hides a remarkable story. Unlike Earth, Venus and Mars, Mercury has an unusually large metallic core and a surface that appears to contain an unusually high amount of carbon. Scientists have now developed a clearer explanation for how these unusual features may have formed more than four billion years ago. As the European-Japanese BepiColombo mission approaches the final stage of its journey toward Mercury, researchers from the University of Liège and KU Leuven have been using laboratory experiments to reconstruct the planet's earliest history. Their work suggests that Mercury's extreme lack of oxygen played a crucial role in creating a graphite-rich primitive crust , while also influencing the composition and long-term behavior of its enormous core. The findings, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters , Nature Communications and Advances in Geochemistry and Cosmochemistry , provide new clues about...