The notion of a “space elevator”, a giant structure rising from the ground and enabling payloads to be placed into orbit without having to use rockets, is a long-time staple of science fiction. In fact, in his 1979 novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” ...
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s TITAN is currently the world’s second fastest supercomputer.To ensure that the United States maintains a leadership position in High-Performance Computing (HPC) President Obama has issued an Executive Order establishin...
If you’re a gearhead your idea of a fun video is watching a properly driven Ferrari, Lamborghini or Porsche blast off the line at a racetrack while onlookers calculate 0 to 60 mph acceleration times. The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 Grand Sport Vitesse,...
With a performance of 33.86 petaflop/s (quadrillions of calculations per second) on the Linpack benchmark, Tianhe-2, a supercomputer developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology (Changsha, China), has retained its position as the wo...
Artist's impression of the JUICE mission to Jupiter Even before the giddiness wears off from the successful New Horizons fly-by of Pluto space scientists are planning new explorations of the solar system. This week the European Space Agency (ESA...
With television content delivered largely via cable, satellite or the Internet (streaming media), it is easy to forget that the over-the-air television broadcast model is still a very efficient method of reaching large numbers of people, not only wit...
Are we there yet? After a nine-and-a-half year voyage the answer on July 14 will finally be “Yes!” as the New Horizons spacecraft passes just inside the orbit of Pluto’s moon Charon and to within 12,500 km (7,750 mi.) of the dwarf planet’s surface (w...
With the population of mobile devices such as laptops and tablets increasing like jackrabbits on a fertility drug, organizations are increasingly implementing bring-your-own device (BYOD) policies in the workplace to gain a competitive edge and reduc...
(a) A low-magnification tunneling electron microscope (TEM) image of Gr–Si nanoparticle (NP). (b) A higher-magnification image for the same Gr–Si NP from the white box in a. (Insets) The line profiles from the two red boxes indicate that the interlay...
Detecting explosives at a “standoff” distance—defined as a meter or two--remains an important, yet elusive, capability requirement of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in their effort to protect government facilities. Currently, vehicle scree...
It's pretty well known that for mould to flourish it needs a wet and warm environment. So what better place than a Food & Beverage plant where you can find high pressure washers, fluctuating temperatures and organic substances. We know this ...
Mockup of E-plane version 2.0 The E-fan plane from Airbus Group is a fully electric aircraft that operates exclusively via twin 30kw fan engines powered by 120 lithium polymer batteries stored in its 31 ft. wings. Built of carbon fiber co...
Our Engineering a Connected World geocaching campaign has caught the eye of a few media outlets since it launched last week. They include: Power Systems Design - element14 kicks off geocaching treasure huntElectronics Purchasing Strategies - ele...
Unless you’ve been living in a cave these past few years, and possibly even then, you know about Instagram, the popular online vehicle for photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking that enables its users to take pictures and videos and share...
When you were young and your Dad--and/or Mom--took you to a baseball game and you walked into a magical place named Wrigley or Fenway or Yankee Stadium, just after they tore your ticket (in my case it was long before bar code scanners) you were immed...
Northrop Grumman Corp. has formed a scientific advisory board to guide its efforts to develop a lighter-than-air vehicle to explore Venus's environment. The company's Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) concept is a long-lived, man...
An additional “leap” second will be added on to the end of the day on June 30, 2015, resulting in an unusual 61-second minute.. This decision was made by the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS), the global timekeeping bo...
Lidar is a remote-sensing technology that measures distance by illuminating a target with a laser and analyzing the reflected light. It is used by autonomous vehicles to perceive their surroundings and is also applicable to several essential military...
Repeatedly putting an aircraft on an up-and-down parabolic trajectory angled at up to 50° creates brief periods of weightlessness. During the climb and pulling out of the descent, the occupants then endure almost twice normal gravity. Throughout the ...
Among the 15 proposals NASA has for study under Phase I of its NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program is one that calls for the use of a soft-robotic “swimming” rover for missions that can’t be accomplished with conventional power systems. ...
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a contract to Intel Corp. as prime contractor for two next-generation supercomputers to be installed at the Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago.. The contract is part of the DOE’s multimillion doll...
Stanford University Professor Hongjie Dai and colleagues have developed a high-performance aluminum battery.While it has been well known for some time now that rechargeable aluminum-based batteries could offer the possibility of low cost, low flammab...
The Lane Motor Museum in Nashville TN was established by auto enthusiast Jeff Lane in 2002 based on his personal collection. The museum now has over 400 cars, 150 of which are on display at any time. Of all the vehicles in the museum, perhaps th...
If you saw the 2014 film American Sniper (or read the book on which it is based, telling the story of Chris Kyle) much time was spent showing the preparation military snipers go through to acquire moving targets, especially in unfavorable...
The U.S. Navy's X-47B unmanned combat air system demonstrator (UCAS-D) successfully completed its first aerial refueling last week, quite an achievement given that it doesn't have a pilot to help maneuver it to capture the tanker's fueling probe in m...
