News

The first prototype of a new, ultra-compact motor that will allow small satellites to journey beyond Earth’s orbit has been developed by École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The goal of the micro motor is to drastically reduce the cost of space...

NASA's Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) experiment aboard the International Space Station (ISS) has demonstrated remotely controlled robots and specialized tools can perform precise satellite-servicing tasks in space. The project marks a milestone in the use of the space station as a technology...

Wireless networks today are able to brake just one bike, but in the future, they could regulate entire trains. Computer scientists at Saarland University in Germany are designing mathematical calculations to check such systems automatically. Professor Holger Hermanns, whose group developed the...

As the number of mobile electronic devices from smart phones to e-bikes increases steadily worldwide, so does the demand for small, lightweight, and powerful batteries. Experts are looking at lithium-sulfur batteries as the next step in energy storage.

Multi-hop wireless networks can provide data access for large and unconventional spaces, but they face significant limits on the amount of data they can transmit. North Carolina State University researchers have developed a more efficient data transmission approach that can boost the amount...

A new form of microscope that can produce results in seconds rather than hours -- dramatically speeding up the process of drug development -- is being developed at the University of Strathclyde in the UK. Scientists are creating the Mesolens -- a lens that will be capable of showing...

Last December, MIT Media Lab researchers caused a stir by releasing a slow-motion video of a burst of light traveling the length of a plastic bottle. But the experimental setup that enabled that video was designed for a much different application: a camera that can see around corners.

With more than 15 million endoscope procedures done on patients each year in the US alone, scientists report evidence that a new version of these flexible instruments for diagnosing and treating disease shows promise for helping surgeons more completely remove cancerous...

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center flew its Ikhana MQ-9 unmanned aircraft with an Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) device for the first time last month. It was the first time an unmanned aircraft as large as Ikhana – with a 66-foot wingspan, a takeoff weight of more...

Navy unmanned aircraft will be able to distinguish small pirate boats from other vessels when an Office of Naval Research (ONR)-funded sensor starts airborne tests this summer. Called the Multi-Mode Sensor Seeker (MMSS), the sensor is a mix of high-definition cameras, mid-wave infrared...

Researchers from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain have developed an automatic air navigation and collision avoidance model using an automatic learning system. Based on how human beings learn to perceive motion, the model builds software using a simulator-based...

Researchers are developing a technique that uses nanotechnology to harvest energy from hot pipes or engine components to potentially recover energy wasted in factories, power plants, and cars.Researchers have coated glass fibers with a new thermoelectric material they developed. When thermoelectric materials...

A new Northwestern Medicine brain-machine technology delivers messages from the brain directly to the muscles -- bypassing the spinal cord -- to enable voluntary and complex movement of a paralyzed hand. The device could eventually be tested on, and perhaps aid, paralyzed patients.The...

Scientists have for the first time visualized the transformation of powder mixtures into molten glass. A better understanding of this process will make it possible to produce high quality glass at lower temperatures, leading to significant energy savings in industrial glass manufacturing. The...

Taking advantage of the force generated by magnetic repulsion, researchers have developed a new technique for measuring the adhesion strength between thin films of materials used in microelectronic devices, photovoltaic cells, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).The fixtureless and...

No chip manufacturer will take a chance on an innovative chip design without overwhelming evidence that it works as advertised. A new software-simulation system offers more accurate evaluation of promising — but potentially fault-ridden — multicore-chip designs.As a research tool, an...

High-gain nuclear fusion could be achieved in a preheated cylindrical container immersed in strong magnetic fields, according to a series of computer simulations performed at Sandia National Laboratories.The simulations show the release of output energy that was many times greater than the...

Clinicians who treat severe wounds may soon have powerful new diagnostic tools in the form of hyperspectral imaging (HSI) devices, calibrated to new NIST standard reference spectra, which will provide perspective on the physiology of tissue injury and healing.The team produced the first prototype...

Today, a typical computer chip might have six or eight cores, all communicating with each other over a single bundle of wires, called a bus. With a bus, however, only one pair of cores can talk at a time, which would be a serious limitation in chips with hundreds or even thousands of cores, which...

Robot squirrels have shown how real-life squirrels signal to snakes with heat and tail flagging. Through field experiments, researchers from San Diego State University and UC Davis aim to learn more about rattlesnake behavior.The engineering lab built a squirrel with a heatable tail and a tail...

Cornell chemists have developed a way to make porous metal films with up to 1,000 times the electrical conductivity offered by previous methods. Their technique opens the door to creating a wide variety of metal nanostructures for engineering and biomedical applications. The new method builds...

New algorithms could enable heaps of ‘smart sand’ that can assume any shape, allowing spontaneous formation of new tools or duplication of broken mechanical parts.Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method,...

The first prototype of a new, ultra-compact motor will allow small satellites to journey beyond Earth’s orbit. The goal of the micro motor: to drastically reduce the cost of space exploration.

Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. The electrochemical formate production and the biological carbon dioxide fixation...