Innovation

bamboo drones

China Develops Open-Source Control That Solves Bamboo Drone Vibration Problem

China’s Northwestern Polytechnical University has released the world’s first open-source flight control software for bamboo-frame drones. The system cuts control delay from 20 milliseconds down to 8–10 milliseconds by tuning algorithms to handle bamboo’s natural vibrations. Free and modular, it lowers costs for eco-friendly UAVs in forest monitoring and education. The team says future work will improve weather resistance.

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UK University AI Chip

UK University Unveils AI Chip 2,000x More Efficient By Processing Data Directly In Hardware

UK’s Loughborough University physicists have built a brain-inspired chip that makes some AI tasks up to 2,000 times more energy efficient than software. The memristor device uses random nanopores to process time-dependent data directly in hardware, skipping energy-heavy computing steps. Tests on chaos prediction and image recognition succeeded. The team says the approach could help solve AI’s rising energy demands. Further work is needed for real-world noise.

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“Cy-trust” helps robots and self-driving cars know what to trust.

Harvard’s ‘Cy-Trust’ System Assigns Trust Scores to Protect Robots and Self-Driving Vehicles

Harvard’s Stephanie Gil and a multi-university team have created “cy-trust,” a framework that helps robot fleets and self-driving cars decide which data to trust. Each agent assigns a 0-to-1 trust score to incoming information using onboard sensors and signal processing. Low-trust data gets ignored, preventing hacked or greedy agents from causing crashes. Tested in lab experiments against fake-identity attacks. Traditional security isn’t enough for physical systems.

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quantum battery

Australia’s CSIRO Builds Tiny Quantum Battery That Charges Faster When Bigger

Australia’s CSIRO has built the world’s first quantum battery that completes a full energy cycle. Led by Dr. James Quach, the device charges faster when more cells are added — opposite to normal batteries. It uses a laser and quantum effects to charge in femtoseconds. Current storage is just 1/200,000th of a mosquito’s energy, lasting nanoseconds. Works at room temperature.

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MIT

MIT Engineers Create Soft Gel That Boosts Conductivity 400-Fold with Light

MIT engineers have created a soft, flexible gel that becomes 400 times more conductive when exposed to light. By incorporating a photo-ion generator into rubber, the material can switch from an insulator to a conductor. This breakthrough could bridge the gap between soft biological tissues and hard electronics for use in wearables and robotics.

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