Nanowerk February 18, 2020 People rely on a highly tuned sense of touch to manipulate objects, but injuries to the skin and the simple act of wearing gloves can impair this ability. Researchers in China have developed a visually aided tactile enhancement system for precise motion control by combining ultrathin, highly sensitive, crack-based strain sensors and signal acquisition circuit with real-time display equipment. With the optimization of the thicknesses of the substrates and sensitive films of the strain sensors, the device has a detection limit as low as 0.01% and an ultrahigh gauge factor of 44 013 at a strain of […]
Category Archives: Sensors
A spookily good sensor
Phys.org February 19, 2020 Researchers in Japan placed a millimeter-sized sphere of yttrium iron garnet in the same resonant cavity as a superconducting Josephson junction qubit, which acted as the sensor. Because of the coupling of the sphere to resonant cavity, and, in turn, between the cavity to the qubit, the qubit could only be excited by an electromagnetic pulse if no magnetic excitations were present in the sphere. Reading the state of the qubit then reveals the state of the sphere. By using single-shot detection instead of averaging, they were able to make the device both highly sensitive and […]
Smaller detection device effective for nuclear treaty verification, archaeology digs
Phys.org January 29, 2020 Researchers at MIT describe the Monte Carlo (MC) based design of a compact epithermal Neutron Resonance Transmission Analysis (NRTA) radiographic instrument, which uses a moderated, compact deuterium-tritium neutron source and an epithermal neutron detector. The MC simulations presented in this work demonstrate accurate time-of-flight reconstructions for transmitted neutron energies, capable of differentiating isotopic compositions of nuclear material with high levels of accuracy. A new generation of miniaturized neutron sources will allow this technique to achieve measurements with greater precision and speed, with significant impact on a variety of engineering and societal problems. The instrument would have […]
Molecular Electronics Chip With 100 Million DNA Reading Devices
Next Big Future December 30, 2019 Utilizing advances in semiconductor technology, nano-fabrication and bio-sensors, a company in America has created standard CMOS chips that directly integrate sensor molecules into the CMOS integrated circuits. The current chip is designed to read DNA; future chips will be designed for protein detection and other diverse bio-sensing applications. It reduces whole genome sequencing from days to minutes, through direct electrical sensing delivered at the speed of natural DNA synthesis. Using a single molecule workflow eliminates the time and complexity of sample preparation, delivering ultimate simplicity, speed and lower costs. This also improves the data […]
A fast and inexpensive device to capture and identify viruses
EurekAlert December 23, 2019 Currently, virologists estimate that 1.67 million unknown viruses are in animals, a number of which can be transmitted to humans. A team of researchers in the US (Pennsylvania State University, New York University) synthesized a gradient of aligned carbon nanotube forest arrays to capture different viruses and detect them in-situ Raman spectroscopy to identify the viruses based on their individual vibration. They designed and assembled a portable platform that enriches virus particles from several milliliters of clinical samples in a couple of minutes. They added gold nanoparticles to enhance the Raman signal to detect the virus […]
Mathematicians propose new design for wireless nanosensory networks
Phys.org December 17, 2019 An international team of researchers (Finland, Russia) has developed a new method for collecting data from passive wireless nanosensors using devices which can measure the parameters of objects and convert them into a signal. They use microscopic nanoelements and do not have an integral battery pack. They do not require any maintenance, have a long service life and low cost. Mathematicians have modeled an experiment with gateways, which are made on the basis of unmanned aircraft. THz frequency range is used for the wireless energy transfer to nanodevices as well as for communication with them. The […]
Thunderquakes make underground fiber optic telecommunications cables hum
Science Daily December 11, 2019 Researchers at Pennsylvania State University report on a distributed acoustic sensing (DAS) array using preexisting underground fiber optics beneath the Penn State campus for detecting and characterizing thunder‐induced ground motions. During a half‐hour interval in State College, PA, they identified 18 thunder‐induced seismic events in the DAS array data. The high‐fidelity DAS data show that the thunder‐induced seismic are very broadband, with their peak frequency ranging from 20 to 130 Hz. The dense DAS data enable them to simulate thunder‐seismic wave propagation and full waveform synthetics and further locate the thunder‐seismic source by time‐reversal migration. […]
Black silicon can help detect explosives
EurekAlert November 27, 2019 Detection of nitroaromatic compounds (NAC) vapors is challenging owing to their low vapor pressure and relatively weak sensitivity of the existing detection techniques. An international team of researchers (Russia, Australia) proposes a novel concept to design fluorescence (FL) detection platforms based on chemical functionalization of nanotextured dielectric surfaces exhibiting resonant light absorption, trapping, and localization effects. They demonstrated the sensor with selective FL-quenching response from monolayers of carbazole moieties covalently bonded to a spiky silicon surface, “black” silicon. It provided unprecedented ppt (10–12) range limits of detection for several NAC vapors. The easy-to-implement scalable fabrication procedure […]
Advancing nuclear detection and inspection
MIT News November 14, 2019 Previously proposed solutions lacked the combination of isotopic sensitivity and information security. Researchers at MIT present the experimental feasibility proof of a technique that uses neutron induced nuclear resonances that is sensitive to the combination of isotopics and geometry. The information is physically encrypted to prevent the leakage of sensitive information. The approach can significantly increase the trustworthiness of future arms control treaties while expanding their scope to include the verified dismantlement of nuclear warheads themselves…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Carnegie Mellon system locates shooters using smartphone video
Eurekalert November 20, 2019 Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a system called Video Event Reconstruction and Analysis (VERA), that can accurately locate a shooter based on video recordings from as few as three smartphones. They released the code at a recent ACM International Conference on Multimedia in France. VERA uses machine learning techniques to synchronize the video feeds and calculate the position of each camera based on what that camera is seeing. The audio from the video feeds localizes the source of the gunshots. It also uses audio to identify the type of gun used, which determines bullet […]