To provide an alternative to energy-inefficient, fume-heavy fire cooking, Paul Montgomery, a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University, is helping to design a better, cleaner stove for people in developing countries. Central to the design is a heat-powered fan. Here's how the process is more...

This week's Question of the Week concerns a new law in San Francisco, taking effect on Dec. 1 that bans restaurant toy giveaways unless the meals meet certain healthy standards for calories, sodium, and fat. Supporters say the move will offer better nutrition standards for children, while opponents say the...

Designing a material to cloak objects from visible light has always been a challenge -- Trust me, I've tried it many times during my childhood. Published today, the New Journal of Physics (co-owned by the Institute of Physics and German Physical Society) details how Meta-flex, a new material designed by...

When the Space Shuttle Discovery launches tomorrow, it will carry six human -- and one non-human -- crewmembers to the International Space Station. The non-human is Robonaut 2 (R2), which is set to become the first humanoid robot in space. R2 will be unpacked several months after it arrives, and tested on the station. He...

This week's Question of the Week, a suggestion from INSIDER reader Glenn Barkley, concerns the Right to Repair Act, a bill that would require auto manufacturers to sell to non-dealer repair shops the complete repair information and diagnostic tools, currently only provided to dealer service centers....

In support of the Blended-Wing-Body aircraft concept, a new flow control hybrid vane/jet design has been developed for use in a boundary-layer-ingesting (BLI) offset inlet in transonic flows. This inlet flow control is designed to minimize the engine fan-face distortion levels and the first five Fourier harmonic half...

Silicone elastomers, used in seals for airlocks or other sealing surfaces in space, are sticky in their as-received condition. Because of the sticking, a greater force may be needed to separate the mating surfaces. If the adhesion is sufficiently high, a sudden unpredicted movement of the...

In a carbothermal process, gaseous methane is passed over molten regolith, which is heated past its melting point to a temperature in excess of 1,625 °C. At this temperature, materials in contact with the molten regolith (or regolith simulant) corrode and lose their structural...

NASA recently partnered with the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) on a project to examine mission suitability and recommend policies and procedures for the use of very large aerial firefighting aircraft such as the Boeing 747 and DC-10 aerial retardant delivery aircraft. The aircraft...

It is currently not possible to perform simulations of turbulent reactive flows due in particular to complex chemistry, which may contain thousands of reactions and hundreds of species. This complex chemistry results in additional differential equations, making the numerical solution of...

A computer model simulates reactional gas/liquid two-phase flow processes in porous media. A typical process is the oxygen/wastewater flow in the Volatile Removal Assembly (VRA) in the Closed Environment Life Support System (CELSS) installed in the International Space Station (ISS). The...

Accurate quantification of defects (scratches and impacts) is vital to the certification of flight hardware and other critical components. The amount of damage to a particular component contributes to the performance, reliability, and safety of a system, which ultimately...

A decomposition algorithm has been developed for global reachability analysis on a space-time grid. By exploiting the upper block-triangular structure, the planning problem is decomposed into smaller subproblems, which is much more scalable than the original approach.

A spacecraft guidance, navigation, and control (GN&C) system is needed to enable a spacecraft to descend to a surface, take a sample using a touch-and-go (TAG) sampling approach, and then safely ascend. At the time of this reporting, a flyable GN&C system that can accomplish...

Large-scale Web security systems usually involve cooperation between domains with non-identical policies. The network management and Web communication software used by the different organizations presents a stumbling block. Many of the tools used by the various divisions do not have the ability to...

Methods have been developed to quantitatively assess rock hazards at candidate landing sites with the aid of images from the HiRISE camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. HiRISE is able to resolve rocks as small as 1-m in diameter. Some sites of interest do not have...