Today we are pleased to have a guest blog on embedded device security from Alan Grau, president of Icon Labs. In July of 2011, Bloomberg Business Week’s cover story was ”Cyber Weapons: The New Arms Race.” Media reports of cyber-attacks by China on military targets and military contractors are frequent and...

Norwegian research scientists will contribute to realizing the concept of storing electricity at the bottom of the sea. The energy will be stored with the help of high water pressure. The idea of an underwater pumped hydroelectric power plant may sound like Jules Verne fiction, but then it was...

Michigan Technological University’s invisibility cloak researchers have moved the bar on one of the holy grails of physics – making objects invisible. Just last month, Elena Semouchkina, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Michigan Tech, and her graduate student,...

According to recent polls, most Americans want the U.S. to place more emphasis on developing solar power. A major impediment, however, is the cost to manufacture, install and maintain solar panels. Simply put, most people and businesses cannot afford to place them on their...

Echolocation is a powerful technique that uses sound or ultrasound waves to locate objects and surfaces. Ships and submarines, for example, use it to avoid collisions, and dolphins and microbats use it to locate prey (see image). A team from the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics in...

A NASA team designed a sophisticated microwave radiometer to overcome the pitfalls that have plagued similar Earth-observing instruments in the past.

In 2013, Littelfuse is taking engineers behind the scenes at NASA for a truly unique Exploration & Discovery experience. Speed2Design TechTalk events will be hosted at two premiere NASA facilities. Winners will meet face-to-face with NASA...

Recently, Russian scientists discovered perfectly preserved blood and muscle tissue of a woolly mammoth buried in the permafrost of the Lyakhovsky Islands in Siberia. The blood had dripped out of the giant animal into a natural ice capsule. The news comes amid a debate on whether scientists should try...

Picture this. You are walking down the street with a friend when a shot is fired. The two of you duck behind the nearest cover and you pull out your smartphone. A map of the neighborhood pops up on its screen with a large red arrow indicating the direction from which the shot came.

The development of a new test asset for Army aviation sensors brings results and solutions at a faster pace. Named the Mobile Apache Sensors Telemetry Trailer, the new sensor test trailer, a collaborated development effort by the Apache Project Office and the Redstone Test Center's Aviation Flight...

A Sandia engineer who trained U.S. soldiers to avoid improvised explosive devices (IEDs) has developed a fertilizer that helps plants grow but can’t detonate a bomb. It’s an alternative to ammonium nitrate, an agricultural staple that is also the raw ingredient in most of the IEDs in Afghanistan....

An MIT team has developed a method for attaching molecules to metal surfaces. The new approach uses a family of chemicals called carbenes to attach other substances to gold — and potentially to other material surfaces as well. Carbenes could function as “surface anchors” to link many...

Combined with state-of-the-art micro-sculpting techniques, a new resin holds promise for making customized electrodes for fuel cells or batteries, as well as biosensor interfaces for medical uses.

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed a cradle and app for the iPhone that uses the device’s built-in camera and processing power as a biosensor to detect toxins, proteins, bacteria, viruses and other molecules.

By modifying the underlying network of cellulose fibers, etching off surface “fluff” and applying a thin chemical coating, researchers have created a new type of paper that repels a wide variety of liquids, including water and oil.

According to a recent Microsoft survey conducted by research firm Ipsos, nearly 50% of employees believe social tools make them more productive while more than 30% of companies restrict the use or undervalue them. Typical professional uses for social networks include communicating with colleagues,...

Inspired by the way plants grow toward the sun and light sources, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have created a hydrogel that is controllable by light.