Stories

In a study presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2012, an experimental device converted energy from a beating heart to provide enough electricity to power a pacemaker. The findings suggest that patients could power their pacemakers — eliminating the need for replacements when...

Diving into a pool from a few feet up allows you to enter the water smoothly and painlessly, but jumping from a bridge can lead to a fatal impact. The water is the same in each case, so why is the effect of hitting its surface so different?

The race is on to develop the most secure solution for storing CO2 in the Earth’s crust. A Norwegian company, Numerical Rocks AS, has developed a method for studying precisely how this greenhouse gas is bound inside rock.

Using a computational model they designed to incorporate detailed information about plants’ interconnected metabolic processes, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory have identified key pathways that appear to “favor” the production of...

Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today. Unlike rigid silicon solar panels that adorn many rooftops, Stanford's thin film prototype is made of carbon materials that can be...

Researchers successfully tested a beaming technology that allowed humans and a rat to interact through virtual reality avatars. Using digital representations of themselves, the researchers enabled the rat to interact with a rat-sized robot controlled by a human participant in a...

Concussions are arguably football's most prominent injury, but they're also its most mysterious. With the help of Stanford University's football team, a group of Stanford doctors and neuroscientists is working to quantify the head trauma that players sustain during a game.

A Fort Jackson battalion is piloting a new training tool that will look familiar to many new soldiers. Virtual Battlespace 2, or VBS2, offers battlefield simulations that allow instructors to create new scenarios and engage the simulation from multiple viewpoints. The squad-management...

Over the past decade the only thing that has been able to slow the Army's premier combat vehicle hasn't been enemies on the battlefield, but rather the technological advancements added to the platform. While every vehicle is designed to have Space, Weight, and Power (SWaP) margin for incremental...

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...

A study by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates that older adults are willing to use robots for the daily activities that become more challenging with age, unless the tasks involve personal care or social activities. After showing adults (ages 65 to 93 years) a...

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.

Anyone who owns an electronic device knows that lithium ion batteries could work better and last longer. Now, scientists examining battery materials on the nano-scale reveal how nickel forms a physical barrier that impedes the shuttling of lithium ions in the electrode, reducing how...

According to Steven Arnold Klankowski, a doctoral candidate in chemistry at Kansas State University, sometimes even batteries can use a boost of energy. Klankowski is working under Jun Li, professor of chemistry, to develop new materials that could be used in future lithium-ion...

The New York Times recently reported on Egyptian programmers' attempts to train computers to recognize facial expressions and define human emotion. This emerging technology field called "affective programming" could be used in a variety of applications, such as providing better learning...

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.