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May 24 | News
Researchers in Germany have for years been studying fire beetles of the genus <i>Melanophila</i>
and their sophisticated infrared sensors, which these pyrophilous
insects use to detect forest fires. They have unraveled the functional
principle of this photomechanical sensor and have started to work on a
technical reconstruction.
May 22 | News
A
team of engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have
developed a way to keep tabs on pipeline health by using a magnetic
resonance imaging machine similar to the ones used in hospitals. Their
technology is called the Magnetic Response Imaging System (MRIS), and it
will be able to look at the state of underground pipelines.
May 16 | News
Thanks
to new energy taxation regulations taking effect in Germany, electrical
engineers there have invented a space-saving energy usage metering unit
that can be simply clipped onto a power cable like a laundry peg,
without having to disconnect the load. The device is based on a magnetic
field sensor originally developed for use in washing machines, where it
monitors the position and orientation of the rotating drum.
May 15 | News
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory has released a new repeatable test protocol that simulates real shade conditions and can predict with much greater precision the effects of shade on a solar array. The new test demonstrated that under heavy shading conditions the use of microinverters instead of typical string inverters can help mitigate the impacts of shade by improving system performance by more than 12%.
May 11 | News
Drawing
on computational tools and scanning transmission electron microscopy, a
team of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Iowa State University
materials experts has examined metallic glasses at the
difficult-to-reach scale of just a few nanometers length. They have
discovered a new nanometer-scale atomic structure that could help
developers fine-tune structures.
May 7 | News
One
exhale and a new device from researchers at Stony Brook University in
New York could screen for anything from diabetes to lung cancer. Based
on a sensor chip built from electrospun nanowires that can detect minute
amounts of chemical compounds, the device has yet to reach clinical
trials. But its inventors anticipate the device to someday cost only
$20.
May 4 | News
A
new look at a 425-year-old map has yielded a tantalizing clue about the
fate of the Lost Colony, the settlers who disappeared from North
Carolina's Roanoke Island in the late 16th century. Researchers are
focusing on he "Virginea Pars" map of Virginia and North Carolina
created by explorer John White in the 1580s. It was intended to be an
accurate map, but what interests scientists are the two patches attached
to it.
May 4 | News
Touché,
a new sensing technique developed by a team at Disney Research,
Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University, is a form of capacitive
touch sensing, similar to what’s used in smartphone touchscreens. But
its ability to monitor capacitive signals across a broad range of
frequencies allows it to perform functions based on complex movements:
doorknobs that know when to lock based on the type touch, for example.
May 3 | News
By
using diamond-tipped tools to apply pressure, a team led by Johns
Hopkins engineers has discovered some previously unknown electrical
properties of a common memory material, a mix of germanium, antimony,
and tellurium called GST. The discovery should make GST more useful for
electronics developers by allowing memory formats that retain data more
quickly, last longer, and allow far more capacity.
May 3 | News
Existing
historical climate records are typically biased to the high latitudes,
where polar ice and ocean sediments lock in the atmosphere’s past. Yet a
main driver of climate variability today is El Niño, which is a
completely tropical phenomenon. Scientists at the California Institute
of Technology believe they have found the ice core of the tropics,
however.
