Results from a recent study that looked at how battlefield-born vibrations, like those from blasts and heavy armored vehicles, for example, are leading research scientists to rethink military vehicle testing and evaluation methods that could also, eventually, improve automotive and...

Plasmas are a soup of charged particles in an electric field, and are normally found in stars and lightning bolts. With the use of high voltage equipment, very small plasmas can be used to manipulate fluid flows. In recent years, the development of devices known as plasma actuators has advanced the promise of...

During spring break the last five years, a University of Washington class has headed to the Nevada desert to launch rockets and learn more about the science and engineering involved. Sometimes, the launch would fail and a rocket smacked hard into the ground. This year, the session...

A bee and a jumbo jet: common sense would tell you that the tiny insect couldn't possibly cause any troubles for the massive airplane, right? Actually, no. Bees can cause trouble. When flying insects get in the way of an airplane's wing during takeoff or landing, it's not just the bugs...

Researchers modeling how changes in air flow patterns affect wind turbine output power have found that the wind can supply energy from an unexpected direction: below. The researchers introduced a mathematical way to measure changes in the flow that gives a more accurate representation of the...

Solar panel modules must fulfill certain standards to be approved for operation. This involves exposing them to high temperatures and high mechanical loading. However, the results only predict something about the robustness of a brand-new sample with respect to extreme, short-term loading....

NASA-developed computer software could help aircraft operators save time and fuel by allowing technology in the cockpit to help determine the most efficient flight paths while planes are in the air - in traffic - en route to their destinations.A concept called Traffic Aware Strategic Aircrew Requests, or...

Stanford researchers have developed an inexpensive device that uses light to split water into oxygen and clean-burning hydrogen. The goal is to supplement solar cells with hydrogen-powered fuel cells that can generate electricity when the sun isn't shining or demand is high.Two semiconducting electrodes...

A San Francisco startup introduced an all-in-one card, called Coin, meant to store financial information from every other card carried in a wallet. The device, available for preorder, includes a magnetic strip that can change depending on what card one wants to use. What do you think? Would you use an all-in-one...

Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7, not just when the sun is shining, or mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges. These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists at...

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego report a breakthrough in technology that could pave the way for digital systems to record, store, edit and replay information in a dimension that goes beyond what we can see or hear, namely touch. “Touch was largely bypassed by the digital...

Researchers at NJIT have developed a flexible battery made with carbon nanotubes that could potentially power electronic devices with flexible displays.Electronic manufacturers are now making flexible organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays, a pioneering technology that allow devices such as cell phones,...

MIT researchers have come up with a way to cool hot surfaces more effectively by keeping droplets from bouncing. Their solution: Decorate the surface with tiny structures and then coat it with particles about 100 times smaller. Using that approach, they produced textured surfaces that...

Researchers have created a “RoboSnail,” which can climb walls and stick to overhead surfaces much like its living counterpart. Such a device has potential uses in invasive surgery and oil well drilling, among other applications.The researchers found that, while digging, the clam’s up-and-down movement...

An in-flight service from Gogo allows travelers to text and talk as if they are on the ground. By using the company's air-to-ground connectivity, calls and texts are routed through the aircraft's wireless network rather than in-flight cell towers, or "picocells."

A string of fiber-optic sensors running along a 36-km stretch of high-speed commuter railroad lines connecting Hong Kong to mainland China has taken more than 10 million measurements over the past few years in a demonstration that the system can help safeguard commuter trains and freight cars against...

Silence isn’t just golden, it’s an absolute necessity for Binghamton University Professor Ron Miles. Miles’ current work involves building a better hearing aid, and for that he needs an extraordinarily quiet room. The University’s new anechoic chamber (a room without echo) is the...

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research Pittsburgh have devised a motion tracking technology that could eliminate much of the annoying lag that occurs in existing video game systems that use motion tracking, while also being extremely precise and highly affordable. Called Lumitrack,...

Researchers from Georgia Tech, the University of Tokyo, and Microsoft Research have developed a novel method to rapidly and cheaply make electrical circuits by printing them with commodity inkjet printers and off-the-shelf materials. For about $300 in equipment costs, anyone can produce working electrical...

Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals, researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering have designed a power-harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to...

Inspired by the way dolphins hunt using bubble nets, scientists at the University of Southampton, in collaboration with University College London and Cobham Technical Services, have developed a new kind of radar that can detect hidden surveillance equipment and explosives. The twin inverted...

A remote acoustic detection system designed to identify homemade bombs can determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives. That capability – never before reported in a remote bomb detection system – was recently described in a paper by Vanderbilt engineer Douglas...

As new technologies emerge and new cyber and electronic warfare threats plague soldiers in the field, U.S. Army scientists and engineers continue to define next-generation protocols and system architectures to help develop the technology to combat these threats in an integrated and...

A StarChase system being used by police in Florida and Iowa allows police officers to fire "a miniature GPS module encased in a tracking projectile/tag" from a "launcher" mounted on a police cruiser's grill. The GPS module then sticks to the rear of the fleeing car, allowing dispatch to track the...

Researchers from the University of Helsinki's Department of Chemistry have manufactured photochemically active polymers which can be dissolved in water or certain alcohols.The effect where light causes the polymer to dissolve completely and be made visible can last several hours depending, for example, on the...

There are eight herpes viruses that infect humans, causing a wide range of diseases resulting in considerable morbidity and associated costs. Varicella zoster virus (VZV) is a human herpes virus that causes chickenpox in children and shingles in adults. Approximately 1,000,000 new cases of...

A high-speed data recorder and replay equipment has been developed for reliable high-data-rate recording to disk media. It solves problems with slow or faulty disks, multiple disk insertions, high-altitude operation, reliable performance using COTS hardware,...

Datacasting V3.0 provides an RSS-based feed mechanism for publishing the availability of Earth science data records in real time. It also provides a utility for subscribing to these feeds and sifting through all the items in an automatic manner to identify and download the data records that are required for a specific application.