Tag: physical sciences
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E-Car Charger Company Licenses National Lab Power Technology
AeroVironment Inc., a developer of electric transportation systems in Monrovia, California, licensed technology from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington that keeps electric car chargers from over-taxing the electrical power grid. Financial aspects of the licensing deal between AeroVironment and Battelle Memorial Institute, which operates PNNL for Department of Energy, were not disclosed.…
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Industry Technology Formulas Given Real-World Tests
Engineers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico found two formulas for predicting technological change, including Moore’s Law, produce reasonably accurate forecasts. The team led by MIT engineering systems professor Jessika Trancik (pictured right), formerly a postdoctoral fellow at Santa Fe Institute, published its findings last week in the online…
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Material Engineered to More Efficiently Capture CO2
Researchers at University of South Florida in Tampa and King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia (KAUST) developed a new type of metal-organic material with the ability to effectively capture carbon dioxide in the presence of water vapor, which had not been previously possible. The team led by South Florida chemistry professor…
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University Provides Mobile Internet Quality Test Service
Engineers and computer scientists at Aalto University in Finland are offering a free, online service to test the quality of mobile Internet connections. Netradar, available for download at netradar.org shows the quality of mobile Internet connections for individual devices, but also compared to other devices and locations. Netradar is a project of Aalto’s communications and…
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Consortium to Develop Disease Model for Multiple Sclerosis
A coalition of research institutes, analytics companies, and a patient network are building computational tools and models to better understand the causes of multiple sclerosis. Orion Bionetworks, based in Boston, is a consortium of the Accelerated Cure Project for Multiple Sclerosis, Institute for Neurosciences at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, GNS Healthcare, MetaCell, and PatientsLikeMe. Orion…
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Bacterial Biofilms Found to Quickly Clog Medical Devices
Molecular biologists and engineers at Princeton University in New Jersey discovered that bacterial formations called biofilms can quickly tangle and trap other bacteria, disabling medical devices. The study by postdoctoral researcher Knut Drescher and colleagues appears online in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (paid subscription required). Drescher, working in…
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Wireless Brain Sensor Designed, Tested in Animals
Neuroscientists and engineers at Brown University in Providence developed a wireless broadband implanted brain sensor that the researchers are testing in lab animals. The team led by Brown engineering professor Arto Nurmikko described their findings at this week’s 2013 International Workshop on Clinical Brain-Neural Machine Interface Systems in Houston, and in the April 2013 issue…
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Faster, Lower Temperature Ceramics Method Developed
A materials scientist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh discovered a new technique for making high-density ceramics needing lower temperatures and that takes only a second. Jay Narayan describes his process in two recent papers appearing online in the journal Scripta Materialia, a viewpoint essay posted last week, and a technical paper published last…
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Ball-Mounted Cam Provides Unique View of Football Field
Engineers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and University of Electro-Communications (UEC) in Tokyo designed a miniature video camera mounted inside a football, with an algorithm to process the images, to provide a view of the game rarely, if ever, seen. Carnegie Mellon’s Kris Katani and UEC’s Kodai Horita will describe their system in a…
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Gastric Model Lands Funding for Expanded Applications
An artificial digestive system developed at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, U.K. for lab tests of physical and biochemical processes in the human stomach and intestines, secured more than £900,000 ($US 1.4 million) for research on new models of nutritional quality and health benefits. The two-year grant is provided to the Institute of…