UW researchers have developed IRIS, a smart ring that allows users to point and click to control smart devices. The prototype Bluetooth ring contains a small camera which sends an image of the selected device to the user’s phone. The user can control the device clicking a small button or — for devices with gradient controls, such as a speaker’s volume — rotating the ring.

Ferroelectrics are special materials with polarized positive and negative charges — like a magnet has north and south poles — that can be reversed when external electricity is applied. The materials will remain in these reversed states until more power is applied, making them useful for data storage and wireless communication applications.

Research on fungus spread could help growers predict, monitor and control powdery mildew disease affecting blueberries.

In a new paper in Nature Communications, researchers in the Center for Precision Engineering for Health (CPE4H) at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Science (Penn Engineering) describe minimal versatile genetic perturbation technology (mvGPT).

Capable of precisely editing genes, activating gene expression and repressing genes all at the same time, the technology opens new doors to treating genetic diseases and investigating the fundamental mechanisms of how our DNA functions.

Researchers have found a low-power, inexpensive way for large numbers of devices, such as machines in factories and equipment in labs, to share information by efficiently using signals at untapped high frequencies. The technology is an advanced version of a device that transmits data in a wireless system, commonly known as a tag. The new tag can support data transmission for large networks of devices using a technique called backscattering. This is where a central reader sends a signal to a sensor tag to gather information, and the tag reflects the signal directly back to the reader. The new tag is the first of its kind to use backscattering in a high-frequency range known as sub-terahertz. The technology could immediately enable low-cost, efficient real-time monitoring in industrial settings, such as tracking the condition of manufacturing robots or detecting gas leaks in refineries, by eliminating the need for power-hungry signal transmitters.

Chemistry students at the University of Cincinnati are exploring lab-grown crystals that do extraordinary things when exposed to light. They bend. They twist. They bounce. And sometimes they explode.

URI professor Alison Roberts and colleagues have published a new study revealing that plants make cellulose microfibrils using a different class of enzymes called CSLD – an important discovery with potential implications for everything from textiles to renewable energy.

Researchers from Princeton University and the University of Arizona have created a simulation that maps underground water on a continental scale. The result of three years’ work studying groundwater from coast to coast, the findings plot the unseen path that each raindrop or melted snowflake takes before reemerging in freshwater streams, following water from land surface to depths far below and back up again, emerging up to 100 miles away, after spending from 10 to 100,000 years underground.