A concept has been developed for a geostationary seismic imager (GSI), a space telescope in geostationary orbit above the Pacific coast of the Americas that would provide movies of many large earthquakes occurring in the area from Southern Chile to Southern Alaska. The GSI movies would cover a field of view as long as...

A low-cost beamformer phased array antenna has been developed for expendable launch vehicles, rockets, and missiles. It utilizes a conformal array antenna of ring or individual radiators (design varies depending on application) that is designed to be fed by...

A protocol was developed as a first step in analyzing the complex organic aerosols present on Saturn’s moon Titan, as well as the analogues of these aerosols (tholins) made on Earth. Labeling of primary amines using Pacific Blue™ succinimidyl...

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) Rover, which launched to Mars in 2011, is equipped with a set of 12 engineering cameras. These cameras are build-to-print copies of the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) cameras, which were sent to Mars in 2003. The engineering cameras weigh

Several L-band microwave radiometer and radar missions have been, or will be, operating in space for land and ocean observations. These include the NASA Aquarius mission and the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, both of which use...

A study by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates that older adults are willing to use robots for the daily activities that become more challenging with age, unless the tasks involve personal care or social activities. After showing adults (ages 65 to 93 years) a...

View the winning entries of the 2012 Photography Competition at the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, which was sponsored by optical systems manufacturer Carl Zeiss, and learn about the fascinating stories behind them.

A team of researchers brought a pair of scale model space capsules to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to try out a rotor system that could be used in place of parachutes on returning spacecraft.

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions in a process called peristalsis. Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and Seoul National University have engineered a soft...

UCLA researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions. Researchers followed 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording...

For researchers in the biological sciences, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.” Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which...

NASA and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Mass., have opened registration and are seeking teams to compete in next year's robot technology demonstration competition, which offers as much as $1.5 million in prize money.

Anyone who owns an electronic device knows that lithium ion batteries could work better and last longer. Now, scientists examining battery materials on the nano-scale reveal how nickel forms a physical barrier that impedes the shuttling of lithium ions in the electrode, reducing how...

According to Steven Arnold Klankowski, a doctoral candidate in chemistry at Kansas State University, sometimes even batteries can use a boost of energy. Klankowski is working under Jun Li, professor of chemistry, to develop new materials that could be used in future lithium-ion...

The New York Times recently reported on Egyptian programmers' attempts to train computers to recognize facial expressions and define human emotion. This emerging technology field called "affective programming" could be used in a variety of applications, such as providing better learning...

What amounts to serious scientific research could, at first glance, be mistaken for students at The University of Alabama in Huntsville letting off a little stress with radio-controlled helicopters.

The Naval Air Systems Command has developed a device that is doing for aircraft inspections what colonoscopies have done for cancer detection.

NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Ground Systems Development and Operations Program engineers in Florida are combining heritage technology and new innovations to design the crew access arm for the tower on the mobile launcher that will be used for NASA’s Orion spacecraft atop the Space...

Three West Point cadets spent part of their summer secluded in a locked research lab with its windows blackened. Their project involved a new piece of software that can identify the location of weapons caches in theater using a mathematical model, based on the research theory of...

Refueling U.S. Navy vessels, at sea and underway, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints, and threats to national security and sailors at sea.

For airline passengers who dread bumpy rides to mountainous destinations, help may be on the way. A new turbulence avoidance system has, for the first time, been approved for use at a U.S. airport, and can be adapted for additional airports in rugged settings across the United States and overseas.

The Army is refining an initial capabilities document for a new fixed-wing utility aircraft that is designed to replace more than 112 airframes with a common platform. The new platform should be able to perform a range of key mission sets and services.

The search for a “greener” way to prevent corrosion on the kind of aluminum used in jetliners, cars and other products has led scientists to an unlikely source, according to a report in ACS’ journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. It’s the juice of the...

A pioneering technology capable of atomic-level precision is now being developed to detect what so far has remained imperceptible: gravitational waves or ripples in space-time caused by cataclysmic events including even the Big Bang itself.Goddard physicist Babak Saif, along with...

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has...

3D printing has been used in the health care field to make prosthetic limbs, custom hearing aids, dental fixtures, and other helpful tools for patients. The printing technology is now being used to create more complex structures, even human tissue. Bio-printers, for example, form human tissue using...