This week’s question concerns the rights of airline passengers. Several recent incidents of airline passengers being stranded on planes for up to six hours may have strengthened the case for a “passenger bill of rights” pending in Congress. The bill would require stranded planes to...

As the editor of an engineering magazine, I get to see all of the latest cutting-edge technology the moment it hits the streets. On average we get anywhere from 20 – 30 new product announcements a day, all of which must be evaluated on their merits. Most of the products are designed to satisfy some need, solve some problem, or generally...

Tamper-evidence properties are often achieved by adding secondary packaging such as foil seals or heat-shrink seals that inflate the cost of the container. This invention provides a proven technology to produce an injection-molded, tamperevident plastic lid for a container that can be used in the...

Most atomic clocks are bench-bound, and even portable units can weigh in excess of 10 pounds. This invention is a cesium laser atomic clock that can be constructed using photoresist MEMS (microelectromechanical system) technology. The glass cell measures about 1 cubic...

A company seeks a technology to enable sprayable fungicides and a new additive that is compatible with current insecticides and fungicides. The technology must treat both sides of the leaves uniformly. Moreover, since spraying equipment represents a major time and cost investment from...

A broad-spectrum pathogen disinfectant is sought that can kill Clostridium difficile (spore phase) in less than five minutes of contact time; preferably within a minute or less. A formulation that requires longer than a minute is also of interest if it can be formulated to provide ongoing protection....

Three device improvements have been developed that dramatically enhance the contrast ratio of microshutters. The goal of a microshutter is to allow as much light through as possible when the shutters are in the open configuration, and preventing any light from passing through...

The silicon substrate carrier was created so that a large-area array (in this case 62,000+ elements of a microshutter array) and a variety of discrete passive and active devices could be mounted on a single board, similar to a printed circuit board. However, the density and...