Stories

Ray Kurzweil, an inventor and futurist, said to more than 3,000 attendees at the South by Southwest Interactive conference last week: "We are a human-machine civilization. Everybody has been enhanced with computer technology," noting how smartphones and other mobile devices and technologies have become a...

Researchers at UCLA have used a standard LightScribe DVD optical drive to produce electrodes that not only maintain high conductivity but also provide higher and more accessible surface area than conventional ECs that use activated carbon electrodes.The process is based on coating a DVD...

Researchers at MIT are working on a system that would enable robot planes to follow standard hand gestures. The team recorded a series of videos in which several people performed a set of 24 gestures commonly used by aircraft-carrier deck personnel.The MIT researchers’ software represented the contents of...

Propulsion by a novel jet engine is the innovation behind a University of Colorado Boulder-developed aircraft that’s accelerating toward commercialization. Jet engine technology can be small, fuel-efficient, and cost-effective, at least with Assistant Professor Ryan...

NASA scientists are making progress in their preparations to mount a detailed research campaign aimed at solving a modern-day aviation mystery involving the unlikely combination of fire and ice inside a running jet engine. The investigation deals with the seemingly strange notion that ice...

Tomorrow's aircraft could contribute to their power needs by harnessing energy from the wheel rotation of their landing gear to generate electricity. They could use this to power their taxiing to and from airport buildings, reducing the need to use their jet engines. This would save on...

The firefighting robot, called the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR), is being designed to move autonomously throughout the ship, interact with people, and fight fires, handling many of the dangerous firefighting tasks that are normally performed by humans. The humanoid robot should be able to...

Inspired by nature’s ability to shape a petal, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a new tool for manufacturing three-dimensional shapes easily and cheaply, to aid advances in biomedicine, robotics, and tunable micro-optics.Researchers developed a method...

In a study of 40 videotaped conversations, an automated system developed by University at Buffalo researchers correctly identified whether interview subjects were lying or telling the truth 82.5 percent of the time. The automated system tracks eye movement. The system...

A “Cheetah” robot gallops at speeds of up to 18 miles per hour (mph), setting a new land speed record for legged robots. The previous record was 13.1 mph, set in 1989. The use of ground robots in military explosive-ordinance-disposal missions already saves many lives and prevents thousands of other...

NASA's Robotic Refueling Mission (RRM) began operations on the International Space Station with the Canadian Dextre robot and RRM tools, marking important milestones in satellite-servicing technology and the use of the space station robotic capabilities. A joint effort between NASA and the...

Predicting how large numbers of visitors to major events will behave is difficult, even using evidence based on past experience. To prevent disasters, police, rescue services, and event organizers have to be able to identify dangerous bottlenecks, hidden obstacles, and unexpected escape routes...

To make a silicon solar cell, you start with a slice of highly purified silicon crystal, and then process it through several stages involving gradual heating and cooling. But figuring out the tradeoffs involved in selecting the purity level of the starting silicon wafer — and then exactly how much to heat...

All across America, trucks and tractor-trailers are transporting industrial explosives such as munitions, rocket motors, and dynamite on nearly every artery of the country’s interstate and highway system. America’s track record in transporting these materials is about as...

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,...

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS), a deep brain stimulation technique, uses electrodes to direct tiny painless currents across the brain. The currents are thought to improve the firing of neurons and the forming of connections that enable learning. The technique has shown potential in...

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...