University of Michigan

Solar car wins for the sixth time

Despite nearly-sunless conditions in the final two days, the University of Michigan Solar Car team has successfully defended their decade-long reigning championship - winning the 2016 American Solar Challenge for the sixth consecutive time.

"72% of 3DP users don't think they're maximising their investment"

Rachel Gordon attended the Additive Manufacturing Talks in Milan. There was a strong focus on materials development across a wide range of applications. There was a consensus that machines need to be fast and reliable, and produce objects with useful object properties before businesses will adopt them for production.

Wearable allows people with vision loss to actually see

eSight's wearable, hands-free headset houses a small, high-speed camera that captures everything the eSight user is looking at.

Solar cells as light as a soap bubble

Imagine solar cells so thin, flexible, and lightweight that they could be placed on almost any material or surface, including your hat, shirt, or smartphone, or even on a sheet of paper or a helium balloon.

Mechanical trees become power plants

New tools for harvesting wind energy may soon look less like giant windmills and more like tiny leafless trees.

Flexible film may lead to phone-sized cancer detector

A thin, stretchable film that coils light waves like a Slinky could one day lead to more precise, less expensive monitoring for cancer survivors.

Funding for batteryless revolution in the IoT

PsiKick, the self-powering Internet of Things systems company, has announced a $16.5M Series B financing.

Solid Power

Established in 2013 as a spin-out company from the University of Colorado Boulder, Solid Power has been working on commercializing the company's next-generation all solid-state rechargeable batteries.

New low-cost battery could help store renewable energy

Storing electric power for days when the air is still or when the sun goes down remains a challenge, largely due to cost.

Nuon Solar celebrated victory at Bridgestone World Solar Challenge

Dutch team Nuon Solar celebrated victory in a nail-biting race to the finish line at this year's Bridgestone World Solar Challenge from Darwin to Adelaide, South Australia.

Hitachi Group to develop basic technology for preventing collisions

Hitachi, Ltd., Hitachi Automotive Systems, Ltd., and Clarion Co., Ltd. have announced that they have developed the basic technology for preventing collisions while maintaining safe and practical speeds by predicting changes in pedestrian movements and rapidly calculating optimum speed patterns in real time.

3D printing and public policy

Although legal principles apply to 3D printing the same as they apply to any other technology, 3D printing has the unique potential to upset the legal status quo. It is the potential scale of 3D printing that may have profound effects on the law.

U-M opens world-class battery research lab

The open-access lab will provide space to build and test battery concepts while fully protecting the intellectual property of its users.

Lightweight solar cells track the sun

By borrowing from kirigami, the ancient Japanese art of paper cutting, researchers have developed solar cells that can have it both ways.

Sakti3

Sakti3 is a company developing solid-state batteries. They were founded in 2007 by current CEO Dr. Ann Marie Sastry, who was then a professor at the University of Michigan. Sakti3 was recently acquired by Dyson for $90m.

A partnership to secure and protect the emerging Internet of Things

National Science Foundation and Intel Corporation team to improve the security and privacy of computing systems that interact with the physical world using a new cooperative research model.

Test environment for connected and driverless vehicles

he University of Michigan has opened Mcity, the world's first controlled environment specifically designed to test the potential of connected and automated vehicle technologies that will lead the way to mass-market driverless cars.

U-M will test 3D-printed, autonomous 'SmartCarts'

A fleet of autonomous "SmartCarts"—high-tech, 3D-printed, low-speed electric vehicles—could one day zip around the University of Michigan's North Campus, taking students, professors and staff to class, labs and offices while also serving as one of the first test beds for on-demand autonomous transit.

How to make continuous rolls of graphene

All the possible uses for graphene face the same big hurdle: the need for a scalable and cost-effective method for continuous manufacturing of graphene films.

The smallest autonomous computer

These devices are helping usher in the era of the Internet of Things (IoT), where people are connected to things and other people through the cloud and contain solar cells that power the battery with ambient light, including indoor rooms with no natural sunlight, allowing the computers to run perpetually.