A team of German thermal clothing designers have developed a way of controlling your body temperature using a smartphone app. Called Vulpés, the are offering the first thermo-regulating beanies and heated insoles on Kickstarter. Based in Lubeck, they have developed a mobile application to connect the Vulpés apparel to a smartphone which can be used to control the temperature of ...

Solar cells made from lead-halide perovskite cells could be improved following the discovery that photons are recycled within them. Perovskites photo-voltaics are new and fast-improving which, according to Imperial College last year, rose in efficiency from less than four per cent in 2009 to over 20 per cent, on par with traditional solar cells. Now a team of researchers from Universities ...

There was once an entrepreneur who named his company after a famous explorer. The explorer, said the entrepreneur, had thrown light on the Dark Continent and the entrepreneur’s business was involved in making lights for automobiles so he was throwing light on dark highways. After four years researching LEDs the company had a great success in developing LEDs using aluminum ...

IDT has added to its power management products with the introduction of a dual-phase digital power controller that can help customers optimize, monitor and control high-power supply systems. The second-generation ZSPM1363 digital PWM controller delivers high performance and excellent transient response, making it ideal for addressing the growing demands in the telecommunications, server, storage, FPGA and infrastructure markets. It comes ...

In the coming decades the improvement and choice of land vehicle powertrain will mainly be dictated by emissions conformance which will mean a cost/performance compromise. This will result in popularity moving from conventional to pure electric as laws tighten and technology improves, writes Dr Peter Harrop, chairman, IDTechEx Pure electric is already the norm for most small land e-vehicles such ...

Head over to Andy Workshop for a wealth of Gadget Master material, including how he built his own frequency counter (originally looking for a simple tool for another project, he was side-tracked into building one himself). Thus began the “Nanocounter” (see right). “I somehow managed to persuade myself that it’d be a fun and educational project to design and build a ...

Scientists at the University of Glasgow have created a very low cost gravity meter which could be used to monitor volcanic activity using commercial MEMS device technology found as accelerometers in smartphones. The result they says is a sensitive detector capable of measuring minute changes in gravity, and at significantly lower cost than a traditional gravity meter (gravimeters). They believe ...

The US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) have assessed headlights on 31 ‘mid-sized’ cars and given only one of them a ‘good’ rating – a Toyota Prius with LED headlights. 82 cars were tested over all as some were tried with more than one headlight option. The rest were: ‘good’ (1 car) acceptable (11), marginal (9) or poor (10). ...

One wonders what the RSPCA might think of this one – radio-controlled beetles. Technologists at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of California at Berkeley are using electronics to control beetles in flight. Electrodes are put on beetles’ legs, optic lobes and flight muscles and controlled by radio signals which make the beetles walk, take off, turn left ...

Researchers have determined that quantum rather than classical physical behaviour is responsible for superconductivity in high-pressure hydrogen sulphide, a result which could benefit the design of high-temperature superconductors, said the University of Cambridge. Last year, German researchers identified superconductivity in H2S at -70°C, said to be the highest temperature yet. To get it working, the gas needed compressing to around ...