Briefs: Transportation

Composite Panel with Integrated Thermal Control

Technological advancements in materials, sensors, and computing have driven demand for higher-performance satellites. Satellites need to be much more capable in a much smaller size with a...

NASA Spinoff: Imaging

Remote Sensing for Smarter Forest Fire Fighting

Spinoff is NASA's annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and services in the fields of...

Application Briefs: Sensors/Data Acquisition

Autonomous Vehicles and the Burden of Testing

AB Dynamics
Wiltshire, England
www.abdynamics.com

Autonomous vehicles cannot be tested for every eventuality that might transpire in their operating environment. As the technology...

Briefs: Test & Measurement

Passive In-Situ Gas and Chemical Sensor

In many chemical processes, it is often desirable to detect the presence, quantity, and/or qualities of certain chemicals of interest; for example, in many closed chemical processes (either batch or...

Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing

Protein Mat Soaks Up Chemical Pollution

Despite years of effort to stabilize proteins outside of their native environments, scientists have made limited progress in combining proteins with synthetic components like fibers without...

Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping

A Method to Apply Thermal and Environmental Barrier Coatings

Innovators at NASA's Glenn Research Center have adapted a process to apply thermal and environmental barrier coatings using a unique combination of a plasma spray (PS) process and...

Briefs: Materials

Recyclable Polymer Exhibits Practical Properties of Plastics

A polymer was discovered that possesses many of the same characteristics as plastics, such as light weight, heat resistance, strength, and durability. But the new polymer, unlike...

Products: Sensors/Data Acquisition

New Products: July 2018 Photonics & Imaging Technology

Trilinear Line Scan Cameras

Teledyne e2v (Milpitas, CA) has announced its next generation of line scan cameras — the high-resolution ELiiXA+ trilinear color range. These new 8k pixel...

Briefs: Medical

Imaging Flexible DNA ‘Building Blocks’ in 3-D

Over the past decade, researchers have been working to create nanoscale materials and devices using DNA as construction materials through a process called DNA origami. A single long “sca...

Articles: Test & Measurement

Eyes in the Sky: Using Optical Filters to Observe and Measure Earth From a Different Perspective

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand...

Briefs: Test & Measurement

Solving a Problem that Plagues Scanning Tunneling Microscopes

Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas have solved a longstanding problem that has been plaguing the scanning tunneling microscope for more than 35 years: How to prevent...

Articles: Automotive

Principles of Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopes

Today’s high-resolution laser scanning confocal microscopes (LSCM), also referred to simply as laser scanning microscopes, are powerful high-magnification surface metrology instruments with...

Application Briefs: Lighting

Military Optics Technology

The demand for innovative solutions to enhance the safety of military personnel is continually on the rise. This includes the need to improve the performance of military vehicles and aircraft, in terms of both...

Briefs: Imaging

Seeing the Brain’s Electrical Activity

Neurons in the brain communicate via rapid electrical impulses that allow the brain to coordinate behavior, sensation, thoughts, and emotion. Scientists who want to study this electrical activity...

Articles: Imaging

Rethinking FPGAs for Smart Cameras

The term “smart camera” has been used for decades, but there has been little agreement on the actual definition. This article will use the term “smart” as the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it:...

Articles: Photonics/Optics

Taking It to the Streets: Designing Streetlamp Optical Components

The task of creating a streetlamp optical system has changed over the last 20 years and due to this change, so has optical design software. Let’s compare the task of...

Briefs: Photonics/Optics

Lens-Free Fluorescent Microscope

Rice engineers have developed a wide-field microscope thinner than a credit card, small enough to sit on a fingertip and capable of micrometer resolution over a volume of several cubic millimeters.

Application Briefs: Imaging

Bringing Multispectral Imaging to Industrial Applications

A mere 20 years ago, machine vision system designers did all they could to avoid color imaging applications due to higher costs and greater system and software complexity. But as...

Briefs: Photonics/Optics

See Objects Hidden Around Corners

A driverless car is making its way through a winding neighborhood street, about to make a sharp turn onto a road where a child’s ball has just rolled. Although no person in the car can see that ball, the...

Products: Software

Product of the Month: July 2018

Altair, Troy, MI, released the 2018 versions of electromagnetic (EM) simulation software FEKO^®, WinProp^®, Flux^®, and FluxMotor^®. These electromagnetic solver...

Blog: Manufacturing & Prototyping

A ‘Green’ Concrete Calls for Less Cement, More Ash

Researchers from Rice University are finding ways to use greater amounts of fly ash in an effort to build a “greener” kind of concrete.

Blog: Software

Answering Your Questions: What is Virtual Prototyping (for Optics)?

Just because it's computer simulation doesn't mean it's virtual prototyping. Our expert explains.

INSIDER: Aerospace

Aerial Robot Morphs in Flight

An aerial robot capable of altering its profile during flight paves the way for a new generation of large robots that can move through narrow passages, making them ideal for exploration as well as search and...