nickel
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IBM’s cobalt-free EV battery uses materials extracted from seawater
Electric vehicles will play an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but they are not yet a perfect solution. Today, most EVs run on lithium-ion batteries made with heavy metals like cobalt, of which there is a limited supply and less than ideal mining conditions. The IBM Research Battery Lab may have a solution: a new battery built without heavy metals. It's made, instead, with materials that can be extracted from seawater.
MIT’s thread-like robot can slip through blood vessels in your brain
MIT engineers created a thread-like robot that can glide through the brain's blood vessels and could deliver clot-reducing drugs to treat strokes or aneurysms. The robotic thread could offer an alternative to open brain surgery, and it could be controlled by surgeons outside of the operating room. Theoretically, surgeons could control it remotely from an entirely different location.
Fitbit: skin irritations were allergies, new wristbands have a warning
Fitbit recalled its Force wearable back in February after owners reported skin irritation, but after an investigation, says it will not do the same for the Fitbit Flex. The New York Times reports that the company and the Consumer Product Safety Commission decided a recall was not necessary, as long as the company makes a few changes. New wristbands will ship with a warning that it contains nickel, a common allergy, as well as a sizing guide to keep users from making it too tight. In a just-posted (at such a convenient time) letter to customers, CEO & co-founder James Park said "we are now confident that our users who experienced allergic contact dermatitis likely reacted either to very small levels of methacrylates...or, to a lesser degree, nickel in the stainless steel casing." He goes on to say that Fitbit is taking this experience into account in the design for its next-generation trackers, which should include the new Charge and ChargeHR devices that recently surfaced.
Stanford self-healing plastic responds to touch, keeps prosthetics and touchscreens in one piece
Self-healing surfaces are theoretically the perfect solutions to easily worn-out gadgets, but our dreams come crashing down as soon as deliberate contact is involved; as existing materials don't conduct electricity, they can't be used in capacitive touchscreens and other very logical places. If Stanford University's research into a new plastic polymer bears fruit, though, our scratched-up phones and tablets are more likely to become distant memories. The material can heal within minutes of cuts through fast-forming hydrogen bonds, rivaling some of its peers, but also includes nanoscopic nickel particles that keep a current flowing and even respond to flexing or pressure. The material is uniquely built for the real world, too, with resilience against multiple wounds and normal temperatures. While the polymer's most obvious use would be for mobile devices whose entire surface areas can survive the keys in our pockets, Stanford also imagines wires that fix themselves and prosthetic limbs whose skin detects when it's bent out of shape. As long as we can accept that possible commercialization is years away, there's hope that we eventually won't have to handle our technology with kid gloves to keep it looking pretty.
