Almost 2.3 billion people do not have toilets, and about 4 billion people still lack access to safely managed sanitation. Public toilets are critical in the fight against the spread of diseases, and yet public toilet design has not changed in the last 200 years. Today’s public toilets can be claustrophobic and inaccessible, difficult to clean and maintain, feel unsafe, and are not user friendly, especially for women, children, the disabled and senior citizens.

The design fluidly combines two common modes of robot mobility: legs and wheels. The robots’ unique configuration allows them to strategically navigate curbs, stairs and irregular terrain.

Most heating and cooling systems adjust the temperature of a room’s air, but with recent technological advances, comfort can be achieved more efficiently by responding to additional factors such as humidity, air speed, clothing, metabolic rate and radiant temperature. This last factor, radiant temperature, describes the warmth or coolness of surfaces such as windows, floors, desks and chairs.

The approach, called DataMUX, could reduce energy consumption and make powerful computing more widely available.

Renewable electricity is on track to replace fossil fuels to decarbonize many industries, but the supply of lithium for batteries and electric vehicles falls short of meeting its rapidly increasing demand.

Superconducting ink — a single-molecule-thin substance that conducts electricity without resistance — has a wide range of potential applications, from a thin bandage that measures heart rate to a phone made from a thin piece of film worn around the wrist. However, previous methods for creating this material have not lived up to expectations.

Research engineers from Princeton and the Indian Institute of Science have developed a protocol for obtaining high yields of oxygen by splitting water into its core ingredients, hydrogen and oxygen. Unlike today’s method of generating oxygen, this new industrial technology employs inexpensive iron and nickel catalysts combined with renewable electricity from solar, wind or other sources to break the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen atoms, and then join two oxygen atoms to produce oxygen gas.

The protein, called fibronectin, is part of a large network of proteins and other molecules that make up the extracellular matrix, which supports and gives structure to the organs and tissues in the body.

The team’s solution involves creating a magnetic-free zone – an area where all magnetic fields cancel each other out – in front of the mirrors to guide particles away from the reflective surfaces and into a collection area. The solution, created by Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory scientists, is highly cost-effective, simple, and could increase efficiency by reducing the need to clean and replace dirty or blistered mirrors.

Micro-sized cameras have tremendous potential to spot problems in the human body and enable sensing for super-small robots, but previous approaches capture fuzzy, distorted images with limited fields of view.

This new system, the size of a coarse grain of salt, combines the camera’s hardware and computational processing to create powerful imaging capability.