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Technologies 7

Sponge-Inspired Architecture for Stronger Buildings
From bridges to skyscrapers to roller coasters, many of the structures city-dwellers see on a daily basis are built using square grid-like frames reinforced with a series of diagonal beams. This design, invented in the 1800s, has changed little over the last 200 years because it is cheap, strong, and lightweight – but not optimal....
cold-SNAP: Eco-Friendly Air Conditioning
As average global temperatures steadily climb, the worldwide demand for air conditioning is expected to triple by 2050. Conventional air conditioners, while now cheap to manufacture, still rely on low-efficiency mechanical vapor compression to cool and dehumidify air, making them one of the largest consumers of energy in industrialized countries. An alternative cooling method called...
Dynamic Daylight Control System
In the U.S. alone, commercial and residential buildings account for more than 40 percent of the total energy consumption – mostly for lighting. What’s more, the deep building layouts that are typical in the U.S. have led to a complete reliance on artificial lighting systems that are less desirable than natural daylight. Many of the...
Liquid-Gated Membranes for Filtration
Just like pores in living organisms that control the absorption and excretion of fluids, gases and solids in response to their environments, flow-gating membranes have proved very useful for many mechanical systems, such as gas and liquid separators, dialysis machines, or open heart bypass pumps. But conventional approaches to create synthetic “gated pores” within those...
SLIPS: Slippery Liquid-Infused Porous Surfaces
The need for an inexpensive, super-repellent surface cuts across a vast swath of societal sectors—from refrigeration and architecture, to medical devices and consumer products. Most state-of-the-art liquid repellent surfaces designed in the last decade are modeled after lotus leaves, which are extremely hydrophobic due to their rough, waxy surface and the physics of their natural...
Programmable Robot Swarms
Collective behaviors enable animals like ants to achieve remarkable, colony-level feats through the distributed actions of millions of independent agents. These collective behaviors are inspiring engineers at the Wyss Institute to build simple mobile robots that harness the demonstrated power of the swarm, performing collective tasks like transporting large objects or autonomously building human-scale structures....

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