Sensors

Georgia Tech professor Zhong Lin Wang holds an improved nanogenerator containing 700 rows of nanowire arrays

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created the world's first self-powered sensors at the nanometric scale. Tiny generators embedding thousands of nanowires produce electricity whenever the wires are subjected to mechanical strain, and can be used to power microscopic sensors without the need for batteries.Read More

Super listening device hears, identifies, and locates any sound by measuring 3D movement of air particles

A Dutch firm has developed a tiny device that listens for screams, gunshots, mortars and even warplanes. It doesn't listen in the conventional sense, but instead measures the 3D movement of individual air particles in order to determine the x, y and z coordinates of whatever made the noise in question.Read More

Hide your pets - this robotic mousetrap was designed to detect and exterminate everything in sight

ENLARGE

This shoebox-sized powerhouse would make Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor proud. Like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer, the robotic "Better Mousetrap" goes to the extreme to detect and destroy its target.

ENLARGE

"Many people have been trying to develop a 'better mousetrap' for years, so we decided to build one in the literal sense," says its developer Jake Easton.Read More

New package sensor tracks temperature, location, drops and light exposure

Package-tracking sensors aren't new, but Senseaware is one that's unique because it tracks multiple criteria — temperature, location, drops and light exposure — and updates those to the web constantly.Read More

HP's new, bigger MEMS sensor promises thousand-fold sensitivity improvement

Last week, two rods snapped on California's Bay Bridge, raining debris on three vehicles and forcing officials to close the bridge, a major commuter artery, for a week. Hewlett-Packard Laboratories thinks one way to monitor the gradual deterioration of the world's bridges is to pepper them with many thousands of small networked acceleration sensors that could, in theory, provide warnings before catastrophic failure.Read More