A gyroscope on a chip can almost feel the Earth turning beneath it

Gyroscopes tell a phone, plane or spacecraft which way it is pointing — and the best ones are bulky. Teams at UC Santa Barbara and Caltech have now built one on a chip a few centimetres across, with no moving parts, that can measure rotation as slow as 37 degrees per hour — closing in on the Earth's own spin of 15 degrees per hour, and roughly 2,000 times more sensitive than the same teams' earlier chip device. It is made with the standard processes used for ordinary computer chips, which means precision navigation — for aircraft, cars and spacecraft in places GPS cannot reach — could one day be mass-produced. The work is published in Optics Letters.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation