News

The U.S. Army has begun fielding new radar systems to protect forward- deployed forces. Several next-generation, mobile Counter Target Acquisition, or CTA radar systems are now able to provide soldiers with a 360-degree protective envelope or warning capability against incoming enemy rocket, artillery and mortar...

Michigan Engineering researchers can "pressure-cook" algae for as little as a minute and transform an unprecedented 65 percent of the green slime into biocrude. "We're trying to mimic the process in nature that forms crude oil with marine organisms," said Phil Savage, an Arthur F. Thurnau professor and a...

NASA’s Supersonics Project is embarking on its latest effort to characterize or define that fainter side of sonic booms as a NASA F/A-18 aircraft takes to the air in a project called Farfield Investigation of No Boom Threshold, or FaINT.

A research team at the University of Nevada, Reno has developed a new environmentally friendly coating for aluminum to replace the carcinogenic chromate coatings used in aerospace applications. The chromate conversion coatings have been used for more than 50 years to protect aluminum...

View the winning entries of the 2012 Photography Competition at the University of Cambridge Department of Engineering, which was sponsored by optical systems manufacturer Carl Zeiss, and learn about the fascinating stories behind them.

A team of researchers brought a pair of scale model space capsules to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to try out a rotor system that could be used in place of parachutes on returning spacecraft.

Earthworms creep along the ground by alternately squeezing and stretching muscles along the length of their bodies, inching forward with each wave of contractions in a process called peristalsis. Now researchers at MIT, Harvard University, and Seoul National University have engineered a soft...

UCLA researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions. Researchers followed 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording...

For researchers in the biological sciences, the future training of robots has been made much easier thanks to a new program called “PaR-PaR.” Nathan Hillson, a biochemist at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI), led the development of PaR-PaR, which...

NASA and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Worcester, Mass., have opened registration and are seeking teams to compete in next year's robot technology demonstration competition, which offers as much as $1.5 million in prize money.

What amounts to serious scientific research could, at first glance, be mistaken for students at The University of Alabama in Huntsville letting off a little stress with radio-controlled helicopters.

The Naval Air Systems Command has developed a device that is doing for aircraft inspections what colonoscopies have done for cancer detection.

NASA Kennedy Space Center’s Ground Systems Development and Operations Program engineers in Florida are combining heritage technology and new innovations to design the crew access arm for the tower on the mobile launcher that will be used for NASA’s Orion spacecraft atop the Space...

Three West Point cadets spent part of their summer secluded in a locked research lab with its windows blackened. Their project involved a new piece of software that can identify the location of weapons caches in theater using a mathematical model, based on the research theory of...

Refueling U.S. Navy vessels, at sea and underway, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints, and threats to national security and sailors at sea.

For airline passengers who dread bumpy rides to mountainous destinations, help may be on the way. A new turbulence avoidance system has, for the first time, been approved for use at a U.S. airport, and can be adapted for additional airports in rugged settings across the United States and overseas.

The Army is refining an initial capabilities document for a new fixed-wing utility aircraft that is designed to replace more than 112 airframes with a common platform. The new platform should be able to perform a range of key mission sets and services.

The search for a “greener” way to prevent corrosion on the kind of aluminum used in jetliners, cars and other products has led scientists to an unlikely source, according to a report in ACS’ journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research. It’s the juice of the...

A pioneering technology capable of atomic-level precision is now being developed to detect what so far has remained imperceptible: gravitational waves or ripples in space-time caused by cataclysmic events including even the Big Bang itself.Goddard physicist Babak Saif, along with...

Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has...

Scientists at Harvard University, Texas A&M, and two Italian universities are reporting development of a revolutionary new lens — flat, distortion-free, and so small that more than 1,500 would fit across the width of a human hair — capable in the future of replacing lenses in...

In the operating room, surgeons can see inside the human body in real time using advanced imaging techniques, but primary care physicians, the people who are on the front lines of diagnosing illnesses, haven't commonly had access to the same technology until now. Engineers from...

Using a novel method of integrating video technology and familiar control devices, a research team from Georgia Tech and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is developing a technique to simplify remote control of robotic devices.

NASA's first mobile application and software that models the behavior of earthquake faults to improve earthquake forecasting and the understanding of earthquake processes are co-winners of NASA's 2012 Software of the Year Award. The award recognizes innovative software technologies that...

A new dynamic simulation method provides precise simulation of fluid materials. The technique distinguishes itself significantly from known simulation methods which use mesh structures where the vertices are locked in a fixed position. In the new process, the mesh structure is replaced by a dynamic structure...

MIT chemists designed a new type of pencil lead consisting of carbon nanotubes, which can be drawn onto sheets of paper. The carbon nanotube sensors offer a powerful new way to detect harmful gases in the environment.

A team of researchers brought a pair of scale model space capsules to the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to try out a rotor system that could be used in place of parachutes on returning spacecraft.The design would give a capsule the stability and control of a...