All Features

Nanoscribe
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antibiotic resistance is now one of the greatest threats to global health, food safety, and development. This immunity of bacteria is a natural evolutionary process, and that is further accelerated by the misuse of antibiotic treatments. For more…

Aliyah Kovner
To combat a pandemic, science needs to move quickly. With safe and effective vaccines now widely available, and a handful of promising Covid-19 treatments coming soon, there’s no doubt that many aspects of biological research have been successfully accelerated during the past two years.
Now,…

Kenny Tsang
The e-commerce industry is forecast to see substantial growth in 2022. Retail e-commerce sales in 2021 totaled $4.9 trillion, and may reach $5.42 trillion this year. Exponential growth in the sector has given rise to an ecosystem of millions of third-party sellers on sites such as Amazon that make…

Adam Zewe
Multiple programs running on the same computer may not be able to directly access each other’s hidden information. But because they share the same memory hardware, their secrets could be stolen by a malicious program through a “memory timing side-channel attack.”
This malicious program notices…

Duxin Sun
It takes 10 to 15 years and around $1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90 percent of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too…

David Chandler
Scintillators are materials that emit light when bombarded with high-energy particles or X-rays. In medical or dental X-ray systems, they convert incoming X-ray radiation into visible light that can then be captured using film or photosensors. They’re also used for night-vision systems and for…

V R Vijay Anand
As the world moves toward a new, post-pandemic normal, industries must leverage digital transformation at an accelerated pace. This is already happening. According to IBM, 67 percent of manufacturers have accelerated digital projects since Covid-19.
Although improved operational efficiency is…

Maggie Overfelt
Machine learning has the potential to drastically improve efficiency and the quality of care in hospitals by tackling hard-to-predict problems like ICU occupancy or which patients are likely to be readmitted.
Yet, a big barrier to any technology working optimally is getting full buy-in from its…

Prashant Kapadia
In four years, more than 30 percent of businesses and organizations will include edge computing in their cloud deployments to address bandwidth bottlenecks, reduce latency, and process data for decision support in real time. Edge computing accomplishes this by bringing the businesses’ computational…

Pennsylvania Manufacturing Extension Partnership
Founded in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, in 1876, Hendrick Manufacturing provides custom metal solutions to a wide range of industries. As a family-owned and operated business, Hendrick has come a long way from its origin as the first commercial manufacturer of perforated metal screens.
During the…

The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was a kid, I was enamored of cigarette-smoking movie stars. When I was a teenager, some of my friends began to smoke; I wanted to smoke too, but my parents forbade it. I was also intimidated by the ubiquitous anti-smoking commercials I saw on television warning me that smoking causes cancer…

Gleb Tsipursky
‘I don’t see how we can replace the serendipitous idea generation of hallway conversations,” said Saul, the director of quality management for a 1,500-employee enterprise software company, during a planning meeting about the company’s post-vaccine return to the office. “If we don’t return to the…

Barnaby Lewis
Harran blinks in the sunlight, adjusting his eyes. He’s an inquisitive child, enthusiastic for all things new, yet still he struggles to understand what he’s looking at. A man is pressing marks—triangles or wedges—into a piece of clay, explaining that in this way he can speak to people, even when…

Sana Kazilbash
The 3MF Consortium recently announced its latest volumetric design extension for encoding geometrical shapes and spatially diverse properties through a volume-based description. The organization, which seeks to advance a universal specification for 3D printing, is currently calling for public…

Theodoros Evgeniou, Caroline Zimmerman
This isn’t a new story: A novel technology disrupts society, bringing with it many benefits but also major risks and costs. We saw it during the Industrial Revolution, which vastly improved the average living standard but also led to poor labor conditions and environmental degradation, all within a…

Silke von Gemmingen
Lettuce is a valuable crop in Europe and the United States. But labor shortages make it difficult to harvest; finding sufficient seasonal labor to meet harvesting commitments is one of the sector’s biggest challenges. Moreover, with wages rising faster than producer prices, margins are tight.
In…

Ben Bensaou
For many organizations, the biggest challenge of innovation isn’t coming up with good ideas—it’s making sure those good ideas are noticed and acted upon. This is a particular challenge for multinationals, such as global pharmaceutical and health company Bayer, which have thousands of staff spread…

Lisa Anderson
Global supply-chain disruptions are rampant. Manufacturers and business owners now routinely deal with triple and quadruple lead times, widespread shortages, escalating prices, and transportation delays. Every link in the supply chain is out of alignment. Think of the imbalance as a sixth-grader on…

Tahira Reid, James Gibert
People interact with machines in countless ways every day. In some cases, they actively control a device, like driving a car or using an app on a smartphone. Sometimes people passively interact with a device, like being imaged by an MRI machine. And sometimes they interact with machines without…

Emily Newton
Welding technology has progressed over the years, thanks to innovations that improve accuracy and overall productivity. Some advances have been in welding automation handled by advanced robots. Other breakthroughs rely on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine vision for better defect detection.…

Daniel de Wolff
Most successful entrepreneurs know that simply inventing a smart or disruptive technology isn’t enough to make customers come running. Among other things, business development involves connecting with the right people in the corporate hierarchy. Yet aspiring entrepreneurs often underestimate the…

Mark Hembree
From asking Siri to suggest a nearby restaurant to programming a drone flight on Mars, artificial intelligence (AI) has become a part of everyday life—and its presence and influence will inevitably grow.
What do manufacturers need to know about it?
First of all, it’s already here. Capgemini…

Megan Wallin Kerth
In the wake of manufacturing and chip shortages, some may think that Covid-19 slowed down production on the whole as supply chain issues and remote work presented significant obstacles for manufacturers. However, there were both struggles and some unexpected benefits that arose as professionals…

Katie Rapp
For manufacturers, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a game changer. Greater efficiencies, lower costs, improved quality, and reduced downtime are just some of the potential benefits. This technology isn’t just for large manufacturers. High-value, cost-effective AI solutions are more accessible…

Prasad Akella
We are a full two years into post-pandemic manufacturing life, with the omicron variant the latest cause for concern. It might sound hyperbolic, but I’m pretty sure manufacturing will never be the same as it was in 2019. In some ways, that’s a good thing.
One silver lining of the novel coronavirus…