News

Engineering researchers at the University of Michigan designed a device that harvests energy from the reverberation of heartbeats through the chest and converts it to electricity to run a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator. These mini-medical machines send electrical signals...

University of California, San Diego bioengineers have developed a self-healing hydrogel that binds in seconds, like Velcro, and forms a bond strong enough to withstand repeated stretching. The material has numerous potential applications, including medical sutures, targeted drug delivery, industrial sealants,...

What if design engineers could work with and interact with assemblies with real-time feedback on the structural dynamics acting on the components? What if physics simulations, which currently take hours or days to compute, had so much processing power available that they can be...

The universal challenges faced by bike manufacturer Trek in creating a new-generation racing bike apply to many companies today: Create products that are sturdy yet use lightweight materials, spot design defects earlier in the design phase, and reduce time from sketch to physical prototype. Trek used...

Offshore wind is an enormous potential resource for the United States - with strong, consistent winds located in the Atlantic, Pacific, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico. As part of a planned six-year $180 million initiative, an initial $20 million will be available from the DOE this year as the first...

Researchers at MIT have come up with a new approach to MEMS design that enables engineers to design 3-D configurations, using existing fabrication processes; with this approach, the researchers built a MEMS device that enables 3-D sensing on a single chip. The tiny silicon device contains...

Scientists at the University of California, San Diego have developed a new kind of tiny motor — which they call a “microrocket” — that can propel itself through acidic environments, such as the human stomach, without any external energy source. Joseph Wang and...

A robot installation developed by artists in the Robotlab at the Center for Art and Media ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany - some of whom are now employed at the Fraunhofer Institute for Optronics, System Technologies, and Image Exploitation IOSB - successfully sketches human portraits. “We have used an...

The Tongue Drive System is a wireless device that enables people with high-level spinal cord injuries to operate a computer and maneuver an electrically powered wheelchair by moving their tongues. The latest prototype of the system, developed at Georgia Tech, allows users to wear an...

By touching a small piece of Power Felt – a promising new thermoelectric device developed by a team of researchers – body heat can be turned into an electrical current.Potential uses for Power Felt include lining automobile seats to boost battery power and service electrical needs,...

For years, scientists had searched for the secret to making tiny implantable devices that could travel through the bloodstream. Engineers at Stanford have demonstrated a wirelessly powered device that can be implanted or injected into the human body and powered using electromagnetic radio...

Plant and computer scientists can now study the underground world of plants with more accuracy and clarity. The revolutionary technique will improve chances of breeding better crop varieties and increasing yields.Developed at The University of Nottingham by a team of experts from the Schools...

A system, being developed by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), allows robots to navigate through constantly changing surroundings. The technology builds and continuously updates a three-dimensional map of an environment using a...

Stanford University Unstructured is an open-source software package that gives advanced engineering students a crucial leg up on the time-consuming process of writing their own code to optimize aerospace design.

Leaner, greener flying machines for the year 2025 are on the drawing boards of three industry teams under contract to the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Environmentally Responsible Aviation (ERA) Project. Teams from The Boeing Company, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman have...

Aviation researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia are developing an information system to help Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) make safer emergency landings and better enable their wider commercial use. Dr. Luis Mejias Alvarez said UAVs could not fly in...

University of Manchester mathematicians have developed the theory for a ’cloaking’ device which could protect buildings from earthquakes. By cloaking components of structures with pressurised rubber, powerful waves such as those produced by an earthquake would not...

Arizona State University engineers are working on technological advances that promise to help enhance infrared photodetection used in sophisticated weapons and surveillance system, industrial and home security systems, medical diagnostics and night vision equipment for law enforcement and driving...

Through the DOE's SunShot Incubator program, over $12 million in funding is available to accelerate innovation in solar energy and manufacturing - supporting advancements in hardware, reductions in soft costs, and the development of pilot manufacturing and production projects.

Geologists have built a new tool to study how earthquakes change the landscape down to a few inches, offering insight into how earthquake faults behave. A team of scientists from the U.S., Mexico, and China reports a comprehensive before-and-after picture of an earthquake zone, using data from the...

Researchers at Cambridge University, Stony Brook University, and New York University have developed methodology to improve battery performance and safety by serving as a diagnostic of its internal workings.Because radio frequency fields do not penetrate metals, one can actually perform very sensitive...

Recent earthquake damage has exposed the vulnerability of existing structures to strong ground movement. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers are analyzing shape-memory alloys for their potential use in constructing seismic-resistant structures.Georgia Tech researchers have developed...