Over 500 investors have pledged to back an inventor’s SmartSocks – a technology that could transform care for people with dementia and non-verbal autism.

A highly sensitive, 3D-printed fingertip could help robots become more dexterous and improve the performance of prosthetic hands by giving them an in-built sense of touch.

A drive system for flapping wing autonomous robots has been developed by a University of Bristol team, using a new method of electromechanical zipping that does away with the need for conventional motors and gears.

Materials developed by University of Bristol scientists and engineers will be blasted 250 miles from the Earth’s surface and affixed to the International Space Station (ISS). The novel composites will spend six months attached to the SESAME module of the ISS, orbiting the Earth some 3,000 times at speeds of 17,000 mph.

A joint team of computer science and chemistry researchers, in collaboration with developers at Bristol based start-up Interactive Scientific and Oracle Corporation, have used Oracle's public cloud infrastructure to combine real-time molecular simulations with the latest virtual reality technology. This collaboration has made it possible for researchers to reach out and ‘touch’ molecules as they move - folding them, knotting them...

Acoustic tractor beams use the power of sound to hold particles in mid-air, and unlike magnetic levitation, they can grab most solids, liquids or even small insects and food. For the first time University of Bristol engineers have shown that it is possible to stably trap objects larger than the wavelength of sound in an acoustic tractor beam. This discovery opens the door to the manipulation of drug capsules or micro-surgical implements within th...

  A new initiative will test scientific minds with the latest technology options to increase the quality, accuracy and access to data used in monitoring and predicting wind trends.

Researchers at the University of Bristol have designed a community of artificial cell-like droplets that collectively displays a simple form of phagocytosis behaviour. The work provides an approach to designing complex life-like properties in non-living materials. The chemists have made a major advance in the construction of synthetic communities of artificial cells capable of mimicking phagocytosis—a complex biological process seen in...

A revolutionary new app has been released this Valentine’s Day. The psychologists from the University of Bristol have launched a new dating app, to help you find your one true love.

A low-cost chip that enables batteries in sensors to last longer, in some cases by over ten times, has been developed by engineers from the University of Bristol. Dr Bernard Stark and colleagues in the Bristol Electrical Energy Management Research Group based in the Merchant Venturers School of Engineering, have developed a voltage detector chip that requires only a few trillionths of a watt (picowatts) to activate other circuits.

Latest technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current. The development could solve some of the problems of nuclear waste, clean electricity generation and battery life.

Most people are now well aware of the environmentally-friendly benefits of LED lighting, as they require much less wattage than CFL or incandescent light bulbs, which means they consume less energy and also last longer.

Researchers from the University of Bristol have used state-of-the-art computer simulation to test a theory from the 1950s that when atoms organise themselves into 3D pentagons they supress crystallisation. The theory by Bristol physicist, Sir Charles Frank, has been a cornerstone of metallic glass development ever since from high-tech aerospace materials to the covers of our mobile phones.

  A team of researchers at the University of Bristol have used ultrasonic forces to accurately pattern thousands of microscopic water-based droplets. Each droplet can be designed to perform a biochemical experiment, which could pave the way for highly efficient lab-on-a-chip devices with future applications in drug discovery and clinical diagnostics.

  In the face of increasing bandwidth demands, groundbreaking research between the University of Bristol and the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology (NICT) in Japan, has demonstrated solutions for network infrastructure to address the looming network capacity crunch.

Making an assistive robot partner expressive and communicative is likely to make it more satisfying to work with and lead to users trusting it more, even if it makes mistakes, a study suggests. But the research also shows that giving robots human-like traits could have a flip side - users may even lie to the robot in order to avoid hurting its feelings. Researchers from UCL and the University of Bristol experimented with a humanoid assi...

A real-time fertility monitor, using technology developed at the University of Bristol, has been launched to help women identify their ovulation window and increase the chances of pregnancy. OvuSense is a sensor and fertility app which measures a woman's core body temperature overnight and then produces a daily graph to identify when a woman is most fertile.

Engineers from the University of Bristol have developed a new shape-changing metamaterial using Kirigami, which is the ancient Japanese art of cutting and folding paper to obtain 3D shapes. Metamaterials are a class of material engineered to produce properties that don't occur naturally. Currently metamaterials are used to make artificial electromagnetic and vibration absorbers and high-performance sensors.

Scientists at the University of Bristol have developed a kind of bio-ink, which could eventually allow the production of complex tissues for surgical implants. The stem cell-containing bio ink allows 3D printing of living tissue, known as bio-printing. The bio-ink contains two different polymer components: a natural polymer extracted from seaweed, and a sacrificial synthetic polymer used in the medical industry, and both had a role to play.

Researchers from the Universities of Bristol and Exeter are one step closer to developing next-gen low-cost, high-efficiency solar cells. The structure is one of the world's first examples of a tri-layer metasurface absorber using a carbon interlayer. The system, developed by Chenglong Wang a PhD student in Professor Martin Cryan's research group, uses amorphous carbon as an inter-layer between thin gold films with the upper film patterned w...