Anyone who uses multithreaded computer programs —the programs that power nearly all software applications including Office, Windows, MacOS, and Google Chrome Browser, and Web services like Google Search, Microsoft Bing, and iCloud — knows the frustration of computer crashes, bugs, and...

By integrating a complex, single-crystal material with piezoelectric properties onto silicon, University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers and physicists can fabricate low-voltage, near-nanoscale electromechanical devices that could lead to improvements in high-resolution 3-D imaging, signal...

Led by a group at the University of Maryland (UMd), a multi-institution team of researchers has combined modern materials research and an age-old metallurgy technique to produce an alloy that could be the basis for a new class of sensors and micromechanical devices controlled by magnetism. The alloy...

Move aside, flat computer chips of the past — researchers from Purdue and Harvard universities have developed a new type of transistor made from a material that could replace silicon and offer a 3D structure. This development could enable engineers to build faster, more compact, and...

Arizona State University researchers have devised a method for mechanically controlling the geometry of a single molecule, situated in a junction between a pair of gold electrodes that form a simple circuit. These manipulations produced over ten times greater conductivity. This development may...

Researchers at the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have released a technical report that documents a series of test procedures designed to enable engineers, designers, and utilities to evaluate the performance of various electric vehicles and...

This week's Question: A report released last week in London and addressed at the U.N. climate conference in South Africa said that reflecting a small amount of sunlight back into space before it strikes the Earth's surface would theoretically have an immediate effect on the...

Stanford researchers have developed a new battery electrode that employs crystalline nanoparticles of a copper compound. In laboratory tests, the electrode survived 40,000 cycles of charging and discharging, after which it could still be charged to more than 80 percent of its original charge...

The gallium nitride nanowires grown by NIST Physical Measurement Laboratory scientists measure only a few tenths of a micrometer in diameter, but they promise a very wide range of applications, from new light-emitting diodes and diode lasers to ultra-small resonators, chemical sensors, and highly...

Without supplementary IR lighting, the M6-200 IP video camera from Scallop Imaging (Boston, MA) delivers up to 0.005 lux low-light performance. The six-megapixel M6-200 video surveillance camera uses five monochrome 1.2-megapixel image sensors, combined with f/1.7 optics.