When poisonous heavy metals like lead and cadmium escape from factories or mines, they can pollute the nearby soil. With no easy ways to remove these contaminants, fields must be cordoned off to prevent these toxins from entering the food chain where they threaten human and animal health. An experimental process to remove heavy metal…
Tracking Mosquitoes With Your Cellphone
It’s a sound that can keep even the weariest among us from falling asleep: the high-pitched whine of a mosquito. This irritating buzz already makes us run, slap and slather on repellant. But if Stanford University researchers have their way, it may also prompt us to take out our cellphones and do a little science.…
Researchers at Stanford Create New Method for Recording Bird Flight in 3-D
The wind rushing between skyscrapers is a substantial hurdle for anyone interested in operating small drones in urban areas. Yet, pigeons seem to have little trouble maneuvering through turbulent city skies. With sights set on unlocking the secrets of birds’ smooth sailing, researchers at Stanford University have developed a new method for recording the shape…
Stanford-Hosted Study Examines How AI Might Affect Urban Life in 2030
A panel of academic and industrial thinkers has looked ahead to 2030 to forecast how advances in artificial intelligence (AI) might affect life in a typical North American city – in areas as diverse as transportation, health care and education – and to spur discussion about how to ensure the safe, fair and beneficial development…
Expert Says Cyberattack Worries Could Affect Elections
A real possibility exists that foreign hackers could throw a monkey wrench into the outcome of the U.S. presidential election in the fall, a Stanford expert says. Herbert Lin, senior research scholar for cyberpolicy and security at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, said that electronic…
Researchers Help to Explain How Stars are Bore, Cosmic Structures Evolve
Working with information sent from the Japanese Hitomi satellite, an international team of researchers that include Stanford scientists has obtained the first views of a supermassive black hole stirring hot gas at the heart of a galaxy cluster, like a spoon stirring cream into coffee. These motions could explain why galaxy clusters form far fewer…
Humanoid Robotic Diver Recovers Treasure from Wrecked Flagship
Oussama Khatib held his breath as he swam through the wreck of La Lune, 100 meters below the Mediterranean. The flagship of King Louis XIV sank here in 1664, 20 miles off the southern coast of France, and no human had touched the ruins – or the countless treasures and artifacts the ship once carried – in…
Stanford Engineers Build Win Tunnel for Birds, Paves Way for Better Drones
Most people look at a pigeon and see a chubby, common, boring bird. A “rat with wings,” in common New Yorker parlance. When David Lentink watches a pigeon dart around a building and land perfectly in its roost, however, he sees the future of robotic flight. Lentink, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford, has…
Team Develops Software To Predict And Prevent Drone Collisions
When Jeff Bezos unveiled his vision of drones delivering packages to Amazon customers during a 60 Minutes segment in late 2013, it caught many people as science fiction. Scarcely two years later, drones are poised to become a technology for not just delivering packages, but monitoring agriculture, gathering news in urban environments and even conducting…
Stanford Eye Implant Could Lead to Better Glaucoma Treatments
Lowering internal eye pressure is currently the only way to treat glaucoma. A tiny eye implant developed by Stephen Quake’s lab could pair with a smartphone to improve the way doctors measure and lower a patient’s eye pressure. For the 2.2 million Americans battling glaucoma, the main course of action for staving off blindness involves…
Novel Silicon Electrodes Improve Lithium-Ion Batteries
Stanford University scientists have dramatically improved the performance of lithium-ion batteries by creating novel electrodes made of silicon and conducting polymer hydrogel, a spongy material similar to that used in contact lenses and other household products. Writing in the June 4 edition of the journal Nature Communications, the scientists describe a new technique for producing…
Solar Structure Cools Buildings in Full Sunlight
Homes and buildings chilled without air conditioners. Car interiors that don’t heat up in the summer sun. Tapping the frigid expanses of outer space to cool the planet. Science fiction, you say? Well, maybe not any more. A team of researchers at Stanford has designed an entirely new form of cooling structure that cools even…
High-Resolution Endoscope as Thin as a Human Hair
Engineers at Stanford have demonstrated a high-resolution endoscope that is as thin as a human hair with a resolution four times better than previous devices of similar design. The so-called micro-endoscope is a significant step forward in high-resolution, minimally invasive bio-imaging with potential applications in research and clinical practice. Micro-endoscopy could enable new methods in…
Calculating the Carbon Footprint of Grid-Scale Battery Technologies
Americans take electrical power for granted whenever they flip on a light switch. But the growing use of solar and wind power in the United States makes the on-demand delivery of electricity more challenging. A key problem is that the U.S. electrical grid has virtually no storage capacity, so grid operators can’t stockpile surplus clean…
Wiring the Ocean
For most people, the sea is a deep, dark mystery. That is changing, though, as scientists find innovative ways to track the movements of ocean-going creatures. Stanford marine sciences professor and Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellow Barbara Block is using technology to enable live feeds of animal movements relayed by a series of “ocean WiFi…
The Impact of Football Concussions
Stanford University researchers have developed technologies that will help unlock the mystery of what types of hits in football cause concussions.For more information visit http://www.stanford.edu/.