Polyhydroxyamide (PHA) and polymethoxyamide (PMeOA) are fire-retardant (FR) thermoplastic polymers and have been found to be useful as an additive for imparting fire retardant properties to other compatible, thermoplastic polymers (including some elastomers). Examples of compatible flammable polymers include...

A method for developing safe, easy-to-handle propellants has been developed based upon ionic liquids (ILs) or their eutectic mixtures. An IL is a binary combination of a typically organic cation and anion, which generally produces an ionic salt with a melting point below 100 °C. Many ILs have melting points near,...

One of the last remaining technical hurdles with variable emittance devices or skins based on conducting polymer electrochromics is the high solar absorptance of their top surfaces. This high solar absorptance causes overheating of the skin when facing...

In precision control applications, thermometers have temperature-dependent electrical resistance with germanium or other semiconductor material thermistors, diodes, metal film and wire, or carbon film resistors. Because resistance readout requires...

A new design for a broadband detector of gravitational radiation relies on two atom interferometers separated by a distance L. In this scheme, only one arm and one laser are used for operating the two atom interferometers. The innovation here involves the fact that the atoms in the...

A titanium-alloy mirror-holding fixture called a strong back allows the temporary and permanent bonding of a 50° D263 glass x-ray mirror (IXO here stands for International X-ray Observatory). The strong back is used to hold and position a mirror segment so that mounting tabs may be bonded to the...

A solution was developed that matches visible/IR imagery aboard a balloon in Saturn’s moon Titan’s atmosphere to SAR (synthetic aperture radar) and visible/IR data acquired from orbit. A balloon in Titan’s atmosphere must be able to localize itself autonomously...

It is noted that the phenomenon of entanglement is not a prerogative of quantum systems, but also occurs in other, non-classical systems such as quantum-classical hybrids, and covers the concept of entanglement as a special type of global constraint imposed upon a broad class of dynamical systems....

Because of their small size, high maneuverability, and easy deployment, micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are used for a wide variety of both civilian and military missions. One of their current drawbacks is the vast array of sensors (such as GPS, altimeter, radar, and the like) required to make a landing. Due to the...

Based upon quantum-inspired entanglement in quantum-classical hybrids, a simple algorithm for instantaneous transmissions of non-intentional messages (chosen at random) to remote distances is proposed. The idea is to implement instantaneous transmission of conditional information on remote...

Motivated by large eddy simulation (LES) modeling of supercritical turbulent flows, transitional states of databases obtained from direct numerical simulations (DNS) of binary-species supercritical temporal mixing layers were examined to understand the subgrid-scale dissipation,...

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...