Magazine

NASA’s Glenn Research Center has developed a method of using entangled-photon pairs to produce highly secure mobile communications that require mere milliwatts of power. Conventional gas Argon-ion laser sources are too large, expensive, and power-intensive to use in portable applications. By contrast,...

Anon-catalytic pyrotechnic ignition system was developed for advanced green monopropellant systems operating with hydroxylammonium nitrate (HAN)-based monopropellant AF-M315E. This technology will provide increased performance and new operating regimes for future...

The need for non-invasive, real-time measurement of the density and speed of sound of a liquid led to the development of an ultrasonic sensing technique based upon the reflection of ultrasound at the solid-fluid interface.

Thruster-based control typically requires a substantial engineering effort in order to mitigate an important issue: the control system tends to use many thruster pulses to accomplish what a single thruster pulse could do instead. This fundamental problem...

NASA has developed a method and system that provides selective access to different portions of a database by different subgroups of database users. In this system, two or more members of a given access subgroup can simultaneously edit a document accessible to each member. This database system provides...

The evolving nature of the Internet will require continual advances in authentication and confidentiality protocols. Nature provides some clues as to how this can be accomplished in a distributed manner through molecular biology. Cryptography and molecular biology share certain aspects...

The Pressure Sensor Mechanism is designed to measure or monitor tactile pressure. It is based on passive Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensor tags and is applicable to a variety of systems. As RFID sensors transmit information wirelessly, they eliminate many challenges associated with traditional wired systems such...

A temperature sensor with practically no effect at all on the temperature of the object measured has been created in the laboratory by researchers at the University of São Paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and is awaiting a patent for commercial production.