The National Basketball Association is facing scrutiny for a new ball debuted for the 2021–2022 season. While the situation echoes the controversy faced in 2006 when a synthetic ball was used, the current debate is less clear cut as the new ball material is still leather.
Read More
Swallows have appeared in cultures throughout history as symbols of hope and good luck. The ceramic swallows of Portugal offer a look at a culture that embraces swallow symbolism.
Read More
A confluence of factors is driving a record-high surge in natural gas prices in Europe. Europe’s ceramics industry is feeling the effects of this price surge and is employing various measures to handle it.
Read More
In the hit show Squid Game, one game requires players to hop across a bridge made of regular and tempered glass panels. One player claims he can tell the difference between the panels, but do his techniques hold up in reality?
Read More
A white cane is one of the most common mobility aids for people with visual impairments, but a limitation of these devices is they cannot detect obstacles beyond the length of the cane. Stanford University researchers developed a smart cane that is lightweight, affordable, and can be built at home.
Read More
In honor of National Hispanic Heritage Month, which ends this Friday October 15, we take a look at a few Hispanic scientists whose research has made a big impact on today’s world.
Read More
Most monitoring technologies involve bulk instrumentation to collect data locally at a small number of locations. An international team of researchers developed tiny winged microchips that could be deployed in bulk for environmental monitoring of a large area.
Read More
Ever since some major phone producers pledged to harmonize chargers for data-enabled mobile phones in 2009, most chargers are now based on USB ports and connectors. Now, the European Commission is proposing legislation that would require USB Type C be the standard port for all smartphones and many other electronic devices.
Read More
Glass and ice are two materials known for being brittle. However, when glass is produced very thin—on the scale of micrometers—it can bend quite a bit without failure. Now researchers in China showed this same principle applies to ice as well.
Read More
Batteries are not the only part of electric vehicles that contain critical materials—many electric vehicle motors use rare-earth magnets as well. Nissan and Waseda University developed a five-step pyrometallurgy process to recover rare-earth compounds from electric vehicle motor magnets.
Read More