A faster, more precise way to create cockpit enclosures may end up saving the F-35 Lightning II program a significant amount in manufacturing costs. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has invested in an automated thermoforming process that could cut costs by as much as $125 million over the...

A pair of carbon nanotube arrays will be flying in space by the end of the year to test technology that could provide more efficient micro-propulsion for future generations of spacecraft. Part of a Cube Satellite (CubeSat) developed by the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), the...

NASA Dryden Flight Research Center's pilots are saving trees, money, and their backs by joining the tablet computer revolution in aviation. Tablet computers have replaced pilots' heavy flight bags, some of which weighed about 40 pounds filled with hard copies of aviation documents. This transition has saved...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced that Amazon's R&D department is working on "Amazon Prime Air," a service that enables drones to deliver packages within 30 minutes. The earliest the technology could be in service, however, is 2015, because the FAA will need to update its laws.

Underwater, emperor penguins can turn into regular rockets, accelerating from 0 to 7 m/s in less than a second. Researchers at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland have created a new propulsion system based on a penguin’s shoulder and wing system that features a...

Tumor removal surgeries pose a great challenge even to skillful and experienced surgeons. Up to now, doctors depend exclusively upon their trained eyes when excising pieces of tumors. A new camera system developed by Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Auto- mation...

Optical devices like telescopes and microscopes have relied on solid lenses that slide up and down to magnify and to focus. To tune how much light is received, conventional devices use mechanical contraptions like the blades that form the adjustable aperture in cameras. Engineers from the...

A $500 nano-camera that can operate at the speed of light has been developed by researchers in the MIT Media Lab. The three-dimensional cameracould be used in medical imaging and collision-avoidance detectors for cars, and to improve the accuracy of motion tracking and gesture-recognition...

Researchers are building a massive computer system that browses millions of pictures and decides for itself what they all mean. The system at Carnegie Mellon University, called NEIL (short for Never Ending Image Learning) has been searching the Internet for images 24/7 and, in tiny steps, is determining how...

Using under $1,500 worth of materials, including a small commercial MIG welder and an open-source microcontroller, a Michigan Technological University team built a 3D metal printer than can lay down thin layers of steel to form complex geometric objects. Expanded 3D printing would benefit people in...

Researchers have combined antennas and solar cells to work together with unprecedented efficiency. The development is a first step towards more compact, lightweight satellites. The technology could also be deployed in the autonomous antenna systems used in the aftermath of natural disasters.For their...

Researchers from MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) created a new lidar-like system that gauges depth when only a single photon is detected from each location. The new scheme could enable laser rangefinders to infer depth from a hundredth as much light — and to produce images from...

Jim Lux is task manager on FINDER (Finding Individuals for Disaster and Emergency Response), a portable radar device that detects heartbeats and breathing of victims trapped under rubble in a disaster.

A conventional low-noise detector requires a technique to both absorb incident power and convert it to an electrical signal at cryogenic temperatures. This innovation combines low-noise detector and readout functionality into one device while maintaining high absorption,...