General

Researcher Daan Hobbelen of TU Delft has developed a new, highly-advanced walking robot: Flame. This type of research, for which Hobbelen will receive his PhD on Friday 30 May, is important as it provides insight into how people walk. This can in turn help people with walking difficulties through improved diagnoses, training and rehabilitation equipment.
If […]

A research team working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has found an explanation for the extreme sensitivity to mechanical pressure or voltage of a special class of solid materials called relaxors. The ability to control and tailor this sensitivity would allow industry to enhance a range of devices used in medical […]

As part of a project to improve wireless communications for emergency responders, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have confirmed that underground tunnels — generally a difficult setting for radios — can have a frequency “sweet spot” at which signals may travel several times farther than at other frequencies. The finding, […]

A new technique that mimics healing processes found in nature could enable damaged aircraft to mend themselves automatically, even during a flight.
As well as the obvious safety benefits, this breakthrough could make it possible to design lighter aeroplanes in future. This would lead to fuel savings, cutting costs for airlines and passengers and reducing carbon […]

A new study from the University of Leicester has discovered a particular window of time when mobile signals and radio waves are ’super strength’ — allowing them to be clearer and travel greater distances, potentially interfering with other systems.
The research, examining the signal strength of radio waves travelling over the sea, identified late afternoons and […]

Nanotechnology researchers at UC Davis have shown that they can use a red blood cell to calibrate a sensitive instrument — an atomic force microscope.
“It turns around the rules of nanotechnology, by using biology to calibrate an instrument,” said Volkmar Heinrich, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis and co-author of […]

Paul Morrow, who will graduate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute on May 17, has come a long way from his days as an elementary school student, pulling apart his mother’s cassette player. The talented young physicist has developed two innovations that could vastly improve magnetic data storage and sense extremely low level magnetic fields in everything […]

Even before Weixiao Huang received his doctorate from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his new transistor captured the attention of some of the biggest American and Japanese automobile companies. The 2008 graduate’s invention could replace one of the most common pieces of technology in the world — the silicon transistor for high-power and high-temperature electronics.
Huang, who comes […]

As microchips shrink, even tiny defects in the lines, dots and other shapes etched on them become major barriers to performance. Princeton engineers have now found a way to literally melt away such defects, using a process that could dramatically improve chip quality without increasing fabrication cost.
The method, published in the May 4 issue of […]

Scientists working within the joint CSIRO/Grains Research and Development Corporation Crop Biofactories Initiative (CBI) have achieved a major advance by accumulating 30 percent of an unusual fatty acid (UFA) in the model plant, Arabidopsis.
UFAs are usually sourced from petrochemicals to produce plastics, paints and cosmetics. CBI is developing new technologies for making a range of […]

This monthly magazine features exclusive reports of innovations developed by NASA and its industry partners/contractors that can be applied to develop new/improved products and solve engineering or manufacturing problems.
Authored by the engineers or scientists who did the work, the briefs span a wide array of fields, including electronics, physical sciences, materials, computer software, mechanics, machinery/automation, […]

New nanotechnology consumer products are coming on the market at the rate of 3-4 per week, a finding based on the latest update to the nanotechnology consumer product inventory maintained by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN).
One of the new items among the more than 600 products now in the inventory is Swissdent Nanowhitening Toothpaste […]

The goal of replacing electronics with optics for processing data in computers is coming closer through cutting edge European research into the mysterious properties of “fast and slow” light. The long term aim is to boost processing speeds and data storage densities by several orders of magnitude and take the information technology industry into a […]

Although the digital age is well under way, one crucial detail remains to be worked out — how to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.
“The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to last 50 to 100 years,” said Ethan Miller, associate […]

Researchers have used the world’s thinnest material to create the world’s smallest transistor, one atom thick and ten atoms wide.
Reporting their peer-reviewed findings in the latest issue of the journal Science, Dr Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from The School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester show that graphene can be […]

A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression, is being developed by an international team including Queen’s University Belfast.
Known as SEMAINE, the project will build a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system, which will perceive a human user’s facial […]

University of Utah engineers took an early step toward building superfast computers that run on far-infrared light instead of electricity: They made the equivalent of wires that carried and bent this form of light, also known as terahertz radiation, which is the last unexploited portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.
“We have taken a first step to […]

I purchased a Prius earlier in the year, and I went in with my eyes wide open. I knew it would cost more than say, a Corolla (which I already had), get probably 15 mpg more than the 30 mpg I was getting, and get me in the car pool lane. I also knew about […]

Nanotechnology could improve the life of the lithium batteries used in portable devices, including laptop computers, mp3 players, and mobile phones. Research to be published in the Inderscience publication — International Journal of Nanomanufacturing — demonstrates that carbon nanotubes can prevent such batteries from losing their charge capacity over time.
Researchers at the Shenyang National Laboratory […]

A modern computer contains two different types of components: magnetic components, which perform memory functions, and semiconductor components, which perform logic operations. A University of Missouri researcher, as part of a multi-university research team, is working to combine these two functions in a single hybrid material. This new material would allow seamless integration of memory […]