When multiple parallel communication links are available, it is useful to consider link-utilization strategies that provide tradeoffs between reliability and throughput. Interesting cases arise when there are three or more available links. Under the model considered, the...

Superpixels are homogeneous image regions comprised of several contiguous pixels. They are produced by shattering the image into contiguous, homogeneous regions that each cover between 20 and 100 image pixels. The segmentation aims for a many-to-one mapping from superpixels to image...

Dr. Jacqueline Quinn is an environmental engineer with NASA’s Surface Systems Office at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In 2005, a groundwater remediation technology she helped develop, called Emulsified Zero-Valent Iron (EZVI), won...

Ideally, the concept of "on demand" shouldn't limit itself to pay-per-view movies. If 3D printers were widely available in every household, consumers could quickly "demand" and fabricate specialized food and other objects at the touch of a button. Scientists in the emerging field of "bioprinting" are even attempting to make it...

Siemens PLM Software (Plano, TX) announced the latest release of UniCam FX and Test Expert products from the High Tech and Electronics industry portfolio within Tecnomatix® software, Siemens PLM Software’s suite of digital manufacturing solutions. UniCam FX 9.1 and Test Expert 9.1 are high-performance,...

Synopsys, Inc. (Mountain View, CA) announced the availability of Platform Architect with Multicore Optimization Technology, a new solution for performance analysis and early definition of multicore system architectures in SystemC. Using Platform Architect with Multicore Optimization Technology, designers of SoCs,...

VISTAGY, Inc. (Waltham, MA) and ANSYS (Canonsburg, PA) introduce integrated ANSYS® 13.0 Composite PrepPost™ and FiberSIM® 2010 composites engineering software. This bi-directional integration, enabled by FiberSIM’s Analysis Interface, allows customers to exchange detailed layup information between design and...

Newport Corporation (Irvine, CA) introduces NSTRUCT™, an enhanced instrument management software platform created to simplify installation and to provide quicker and simpler instrument and experiment setup and use. Flexible and scalable, the instrument manager is designed with a set of features that create...

Will tomorrow's cars run on fungi fuel? As gas prices are set to rise, I thought it'd be interesting to point to recent biomass fuel efforts by researchers at Sandia National Laboratories. The Sandia team is modifying an endophytic fungus so that it will produce hydrocarbons, which work well as fuels for internal combustion engines....

This week's question addresses a robot and one of America's most well-known game shows. A supercomputer named Watson, designed by IBM and consisting of 90 IBM Power 750 Express servers, is set to face two human contestants on the US quiz show Jeopardy this...

This week's question looks at an announcement from scientists operating NASA's Kepler satellite, who reported this week that they had identified 1,235 possible planets orbiting other stars, potentially three times the previously recorded number. Although no Earth-like planet has been...

A method has been developed for unambiguously measuring the exact magnetic field experienced by trapped mercury ions contained within an atomic clock intended for space applications. In general, atomic clocks are insensitive to external perturbations that would change...