Princeton University

Researchers have developed the first perovskite solar cell with a commercially viable lifetime, marking a major milestone for an emerging class of renewable energy technology. The team projects their device can perform above industry standards for around 30 years, far more than the 20 years used as a threshold for viability for solar cells.

Borrowing a technique from inkjet printers, researchers have rolled out a pixel-by-pixel method to program and manufacture soft structures for use in robotics, biomedical devices or architectural features.

Micro-sized cameras have great potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but past approaches captured fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

Researchers have invented bubble casting, a new way to make soft robots using "fancy balloons" that change shape in predictable ways when inflated with air.

The discovery in 2018 of superconductivity in two single-atom-thick layers of graphene stacked at a precise angle of 1.1 degrees (called 'magic'-angle twisted bilayer graphene) came as a big surprise to the scientific community. Since the discovery, physicists have asked whether magic graphene's superconductivity can be understood using existing theory, or whether fundamentally new approaches are required - such as those being marshalled to understand the mysterious ceramic compound that superconducts at high temperatures.