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Application Spotlight: Light-duty ring in an air vent nozzle

Explore how a light-duty Spirolox^® retaining ring is used in an airplane air vent nozzle to regulate airflow. This application spotlight shows how the ring fits into a groove in the plastic housing, securing the nozzle during rotation. Designed for light loads and axial positioning, it offers a simple, economical solution that is easy to install and remove.
View this informative Smalley video.

Fasteners for automotive and agricultural equipment

Norm Fasteners has acquired an automotive fastener manufacturing plant in Plymouth, MI, expanding its North American footprint beyond sales, engineering, and logistics. The local facility produces metric fasteners (M4-M24) and engine bolts. Norm’s portfolio includes wheel bolts, studs, custom fasteners, and licensed MAThread^® and TAPTITE^® products, serving diverse automotive and industrial assembly needs.
Learn more or contact Belgin Tunce for more information.

3M Cooling Film for vehicle roofs launched

New 3M Cooling Film is a roof-applied heat-management solution designed to help keep vehicle cabins cooler, reduce cooling demand, and improve operational efficiency. The aftermarket product uses advanced thermal management technology to reflect more than 85% of solar radiation. Interior vehicle temperatures can be reduced by up to 10 degrees F with this product. Installs like graphics by professional installers using 3M adhesive technologies. Initially designed for fleet and rail operators.
Learn more.

Test your knowledge: High-temp adhesives

Put your knowledge to the test by trying to answer these key questions on how to choose the right high-temperature-resistant adhesive. The technical experts from Master Bond cover critical information necessary for the selection process, including questions on glass transition temperature and service temperature range. Some of the answers may surprise even the savviest of engineers.
Take the quiz.

New Air Holster Safety Air Gun Mount

EXAIR's new Model 5930 Air Holster provides a simple and convenient way to keep Safety Air Guns secure and within easy reach at workstations throughout a facility. Designed to give operators a designated location for their air gun when not in use, the Air Holster helps prevent misplaced tools while keeping work areas organized and efficient. Its practical design makes it an ideal addition to manufacturing, assembly, maintenance, and other industrial workstations where Safety Air Guns are frequently used.
Learn more.

Southco access hardware in rail applications

Discover how Southco's rail access hardware solutions help improve safety, reliability, and operational efficiency across modern rail networks. The video showcases a range of rail applications where Southco's access hardware plays a critical role, including driver cabins, lighting systems, tray tables, headrests, armrests, and other passenger and operator touchpoints. Designed to support dependable performance in demanding moving environments, Southco's solutions help operators streamline maintenance processes, minimize downtime, and enable more proactive asset management.
View the video.

Multi-zone tension leveler for hard-to-flatten alloys

Redex USA's Levelflex^® is a modular, multi-zone tension leveler engineered for continuous processing lines, including coating and heat treatment of aluminum alloys and where flatness is critical to coating adhesion and downstream formability. By stretching material within 95% of its yield strength, it corrects stubborn flatness defects in fewer passes. It comes in open-loop pure stretch or closed-loop tension measurement modes to optimize surface integrity and eliminate crossbow.
Learn more.

Hold any shape with ID and OD Form Holding Clamps

These simple OD and ID clamping solutions from Fixtureworks clamp onto your part in one easy operation, eliminating the need for custom fixtures. They allow users to clamp onto the inner or outer diameter of small-size, irregularly shaped work parts fast. Lots of options.
Learn more.

Need inserts? We make it E-Z.

Founded in 1956, E-Z LOK allows users to repair damaged or worn-out threads without the need for special taps or installation tools. Our line of threaded locking inserts is used in metal, plastic, wood, composite, and additive industries. Extensive inventories are maintained in four warehouses across the U.S., and all products are sold through industrial distributors. One source for all your needs!
Learn more
or contact Kyle Lindsly-Roach for free samples at 310.323.5613 x221.

Stop paying the 'assembly tax': Why your next design should be one part not 10

"As metal additive manufacturing (AM) moves from the prototyping lab to mainline production, the most significant ROI isn't found in making parts faster, it's found in making fewer of them." So says Erica Manzella of Go Engineer. Learn about the hidden costs of traditional assembly, the DfAM toolset native to SOLIDWORKS, and the advanced 3DEXPERIENCE optimization tools and industrial metal AM hardware that are making monolithic design a physical reality.
Read the GoEngineer blog.

Best-seller: Copper filament for 3D printing

Virtual Foundry, the company that brought us 3D-printable lunar regolith simulant, says Copper Filamet™ (not a typo) is its best-selling metal filament. This material is compatible with any open-architecture FDM/FFF 3D printer. After sintering, final parts are 100% pure copper. The company says this is one of the easiest materials to print and sinter. Stainless steel, porcelain, aluminum, and titanium available too.
Learn more and get all the specs.

What can replace a coil spring? You've got better options!

Traditional coil springs can limit mechanical designs. Wave springs offer a space-saving alternative, providing equivalent force and deflection in up to half the operating height while reducing assembly size and weight. There are four wave spring types that can replace a coil spring. Learn how each variant delivers unique performance capabilities to optimize space, efficiency, and reliability.
Read this informative NEW Smalley technical article.

Next-gen metal bonding: 3M Scotch-Weld 8500 Series

Replace traditional fasteners and streamline assembly with 3M Scotch-Weld Acrylic Adhesive DP8507NS. Engineered for direct bonding to bare or slightly oily metals with minimal surface prep, this high-performance adhesive withstands paint bake cycles up to 200 C (392 F), resists corrosion, and holds strong down to -40 C. Upgrade durability, aesthetics, and design flexibility. Bonds many plastics too!
View the video.

3 things you need to get right when 3D printing gears

When businesses decide to 3D print their own gears, they can reduce lead times and costs associated with replacements, prototypes, and small-batch production runs significantly. According to the experts at igus, however, "achieving industrial-grade reliability requires more than just a digital file; there are several fundamental technical basics you must master first to ensure your gears can withstand the rigors of real-world use."
Read this informative igus tech tip.

DURACON polymer with 30% recycled content

Daicel Corporation's High Performance Polymers SBU has launched four new DURACON^® POM grades featuring 30% post-consumer recycled (PCR) content. Unveiled at CHINAPLAS 2026, the lineup includes Standard, Low VOC, Sliding, and Tough options. Leveraging advanced compounding expertise, Daicel maintains quality and mechanical performance comparable to standard virgin resin grades for demanding global industrial and automotive components.
Learn more.

Ultrasound-based pacemaker noninvasively steadies the heart

By Jennifer Chu, MIT

MIT engineers have developed a noninvasive pacemaker that stimulates the heart using ultrasound. The design could one day provide a surgery-free alternative to traditional cardiac implants.

The new device is designed as a small sticker that can be worn on the chest. Tiny transducers on the sticker send ultrasound pulses through the chest to stimulate the heart. The ultrasound waves trigger the opening of certain ion channels in heart cells, an effect the researchers amplified through genetic engineering. When the channels open, they let in calcium, which signals a heart cell to squeeze and beat.

In experiments in the lab, the researchers applied ultrasound waves to engineered human cardiac cells and found that the pulses effectively maintained the cells' healthy contractions. They also tested the ultrasound sticker on rats and found the device quickly, safely, and noninvasively corrected arrhythmias and restored normal, regular heart contractions.

The team has fabricated a prototype that includes the ultrasound sticker (about the size of a postage stamp) and a small, pocket-sized device containing associated batteries and electronics. The same group previously demonstrated a sticker design that uses ultrasound to image deep organs and tissues. They now plan to combine the two approaches into one ultrasound sticker to simultaneously monitor and regulate the heart's activity.

"We believe you could one day have stickers on the body that could do long-term imaging deep in the body and also do stimulation for therapeutic effects, in a noninvasive closed-loop way," says Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

Zhao and his colleagues, together with collaborators from Professor Qifa Zhou's group at the University of Southern California (USC), have published their results in a study appearing in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. The study's MIT co-authors include first author Chen Gong, together with Runze Li, Won Jun Song, and former postdocs Gengxi Lu, Shucong Li, and Hsiao-Chuan Liu. Other collaborators include researchers from Harvard University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and other groups at USC.

Sound genes
Today, around 3 million adults in the United States live with pacemakers. The small battery-powered devices are surgically implanted in a person's chest. They deliver electrical impulses to regulate heart rate. Implantable pacemakers are a well-established and generally safe medical treatment that nonetheless comes with risks.

"Pacemakers are one of the most important and widely used human implants, and they have saved millions of lives," the paper's co-corresponding author, Gengxi Lu, says. "But they are invasive, and they make direct contact with the beating heart. The dream for many years has been noninvasive heart stimulation with ultrasound."

Ultrasound encompasses a range of acoustic waves that safely penetrates the body. Ultrasound waves reflect and resonate off structures in characteristic ways that allow technicians to resolve and image organs and tissues inside the body. Ultrasound can also be directed and focused to stimulate certain therapeutic effects, for instance in the brain, where scientists are exploring the use of ultrasound to treat Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, and other brain disorders.

Scientists have also found that ultrasound can benefit the heart. Previous studies in animals have shown that focused ultrasound can safely activate heart cells, though the effect has been inconsistent and weak.

Zhao and his colleagues looked to amplify ultrasound's effects on the heart. In their new study, they applied sonogenetics, which is a relatively new approach that takes after optogenetics -- a technique that involves genetically manipulating specific parts of a cell to respond to light. Similarly, sonogenetics aims to genetically engineer cells to respond to sound, including ultrasound.

In their work to develop an ultrasound pacemaker, the team first looked to increase heart cells' sensitivity to ultrasound, through sonogenetics. In the lab, they used standard practices to derive heart cells from embryonic stem cells, and then delivered a genetic alteration to the cells that increased their sensitivity to ultrasound. Specifically, the manipulation produced ion channels that opened more readily in response to ultrasound.

"These channels can now 'hear' ultrasound better and can open to let calcium in, which is what directly activates the cell and causes it to beat," explains by the paper's first author, Chen Gong.

Sticker health
In experiments with sonogenetically engineered heart cells, the researchers found that when they exposed the cells to ultrasound, the cells beat in sync with the waves, unlike cells that were not genetically manipulated.

In any clinical application of an ultrasound pacemaker, the team envisions that a patient could first receive a one-time injection, similar to a vaccine, that would act to genetically boost the sensitivity of cardiac cells to the pacemaker's ultrasound waves. The injection would be a form of gene therapy -- a treatment that is currently approved by the FDA to treat certain inherited conditions such as sickle cell disease and spinal muscular dystrophy.

"We think this step would be clinically translatable as a form of gene therapy that could enable noninvasive pacemakers," Gong says.

The team then designed the core of the ultrasound pacemaker, in the form of a postage-stamp-sized sticker embedded with tiny ultrasound transducers. The sticky part of the device is made from a hydrogel material that Zhao's group has refined over the years to adhere strongly to skin and many types of materials, while also allowing ultrasound waves to pass through without weakening. The transducers within the sticker can be tuned to generate ultrasound waves at specific frequencies.

In experiments with rats, the researchers first administered a sonogenetic, ultrasound-boosting solution through their tails. They then adhered a miniature version of the pacemaker to the rats' chests. When they turned the stickers on, they observed that the ultrasound quickly regulated the animals' hearts. Some individuals with slow heart rates were brought up to a normal rate, while others with irregular heartbeats were steadied, keeping in sync with ultrasound's "ticks."

"We can now use low-intensity ultrasound to open ion channels in cells to have very effective heart pacing," Gong says. "We are now making these stickers into smaller form factors, and more integrated, so they are easier to wear, more stable, and more accurate over a longer term."

"In this paper, we demonstrated noninvasive pacemaking. However, we think this concept could be useful beyond just the heart," Zhao says. "We believe you could one day have stickers over different parts of the body that could do long-term imaging, monitoring, and closed-loop therapeutic stimulation."

Published June 2026

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