Features

A technology recharges batteries in up to one-tenth the time of conventional methods. The device creates conditions within the battery that allow power to be input as fast as the cell can accept the charge. By creating a charging “ecosystem,” the optimum battery charging conditions are...

New polyester compositions feature desired electrical characteristics without unduly deteriorating the other valued melt viscosity, processing, and shaped article properties. The electrically conductive polyester has strong conductivity at low carbon black loading. The use of carbon black with...

A global organization needs innovative technologies that will decrease the surface friction between steel surfaces. Thin, 0.2-mm steel components must come into shear contact with each other, resulting in slip, wear, and heat. The components are lubricated to reduce friction. Any proposed solution must have some...

By minimizing the distance between the rotating vanes of a turbine and the static case structure housing the rotating blades, a client seeks to improve the efficiency of jet engines. Eliminating system leakage is essential to providing the most amount of energy for the lowest cost. The compressor fans of a turbine...

Voting is officially open for the 2011 NASA Tech Briefs Readers’ Choice Product of the Year awards. You can cast your vote for one of 12 nominees featured this year as Products of the Month.

A new video compiles 309 images taken by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, providing an historic record of a three-year trek that totaled about 13 miles across a Martian plain pocked with smaller craters. While Opportunity was traveling from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, between...

NASA engineers have produced a material that absorbs, on average, more than 99 percent of the ultraviolet, visible, infrared, and far-infrared light that hits it -- a development that promises to open new frontiers in space technology. Engineers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, developed...

Tractor beams — the ability to trap and move objects using laser light — are not just “Star Trek” science fiction, and are not beyond current technology. A team of NASA scientists has won funding to study the concept of remotely capturing planetary or atmospheric particles, and delivering them to a...