Search

In the vast research effort to get energy from controlled nuclear fusion, there are two major approaches: One in which a swimming-pool sized plasma of highly energized tritium is heated [...]

Biomimetics is on its way to giving us the kind of material we need to build more compliant, stable robots that will be able to walk and hop. Researchers at [...]

They have shown in a computer simulation that it should work. Now they are going to build one. Purdue engineers have demonstrated through mathematical simulations that nanoscale antennas can dramatically [...]

Nanostructuring materials is one of the most promising emerging technologies. We will be able to manipulate nanomagnets for data storage, nanocatalysts for chemical processing, and composites with better optical properties. [...]

'This material promises to be the first in a series with many applications in electronics, chemistry, and the life sciences,' Rajendra Bhat, lead researcher of a team at North Carolina [...]

Watch work at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Biologic nanotechnologists there are plotting one of the first realizations of the oft-forecast nano machines that work within a patient's blood. [...]

We're on the road to nanomagnetics. Physicists in England have found a way to manipulate magnetism just as electronic devices manipulate electric charge. The first step toward microchips that calculate [...]

Nanotechnology's best gift to engineering has been its growing skill at designing the microstructures and nanostructures of materials. It's the heart of materials science. At the same time, silicon nitride [...]

The first systems are about to be deployed in a nationwide computing grid giving researchers capabilities beyond what they can do with existing computers. Two IBM supercomputers and a massive [...]

Designers at startup Cell Matrix tell us this will be the next generation of configurable circuit architecture. It goes beyond basic FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) to build arrays of [...]

The photonic band gap (PBG) is a marvel of photonics. An artificial lattice of dielectric media that creates frequency regions where photons can't go in any direction give us our [...]

Tough coatings of bacteria form on everything from teeth and prosthetic devices to the hulls of ships, and they are always a problem. On teeth they lead to plaque, which [...]

It's hard to overestimate the importance of sequencing the genome of rice, as has just been done for two strains by Chinese and US researchers. Rice is a staple food [...]

Separating DNA molecules in labs-on-chips, something we do for everything from forensics to medical testing, can be a tedious business. By present methods it takes anything from half a day [...]

The only resemblance between the fusion in imploding bubbles reported from Oak Ridge and the infamous 'cold fusion' embarrassment, aside from both being benchtop experiments, is that the Oak Ridge [...]

We'll see more next month, UCLA's Yang Yang tells Inside R&D, but we got preliminary word on an organic memory device they are working on there. It could be a [...]

The research goes back before September 11, but took on new significance that day. Theoretical physicist at SUNY Buffalo have come up with a shock absorption system so powerful that [...]

Start thinking of the ways you could use an adhesive that bonds and releases parts when you change the temperature. Your design and manufacturing engineers should have a ball. Sandia [...]

RUSHED WORK MAY BE BETTER WORK Conventional wisdom is that a project's quality will be improved if you can eliminate, or at least hold down the schedule pressure. Not so, [...]

'We really think that the nanomaterial is conceptually new,' Aimin Song tells Inside R&D from Lund University in Sweden. 'It is rare that anew material can immediately show promising advantages [...]

Researchers at University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign have been developing a set of phenolicgased activated carbon fibers (ACFs) which show much better adsorption capacities over the granulated activated carbons. They show other [...]

The race among different rechargeable battery types is still too close to call, but lithium batteries-already running a good race--are about to get an important boost. Materials scientists at MIT [...]

Control is the name of the game for electronics, photonics, spintronics, or anything else useful you want to do with small bits of energy. Spintronics just took an important step [...]

Score another one for carbon nanotubes in the race to see which technology will get us to nanoelectronics first. Hong Kong physicists have grown single-walled carbon nanotubes within the pores [...]

Emerging technologies keep calling for thinner, better, easier, or cheaper thin films. You need a high degree of control over film quality and position when designing advanced materials for specialized [...]

Much of optical communications research has tried to get more data to go through the fiber. A problem has been that we didn't know what we were shooting for; we [...]

Computers haven't replaced lawyers and haven't automated appeals processes, but they have moved into legal offices in a big way. Artificial intelligence, computation used for intelligent decision making, has moved [...]

Wetting can be a real problem, particularly in microfluidics where the tendency of a liquid to stick to a surface makes it harder to move in tiny channels. The usual [...]

We were already aware that things work in mysterious ways once they cross the nanoscale threshold. The trick is to put these ways to work. A physicist at Georgia Tech [...]

The technology is called MRAM--magnetic random access memory--and it will take computer memory in a new direction by being able to hold onto data even when power is lost. At [...]

We've known for 12 years that if you make silicon small enough you can make it emit light. For 12 years we have struggled with that thought, trying to make [...]

When the payoff seems so close we can taste it, research progress has a way of speeding up. Superconductivity is the best available example of this. It took 20 years [...]

The next generation of communication systems will have a high capacity, will use all-optical switching, and will be ultrafast--a few Tbits a second. To actually make an all-optical switching device, [...]

'Even if we have to compute in a vacuum chamber, spintronics will be ten times faster than anything else and everybody will want it,' University of Arkansas physicist Vincent LaBella [...]

Here's a green chemical process that should have a large impact. Chemists in China have developed a more environmentally friendly way to oxidize propylene into propylene oxide, a major industrial [...]

Patent battles are raging over getting blue light at all from lasers, but sometimes just being blue isn't enough. Physicists in Scotland fit these more particular needs with a frequency [...]

Virtually anybody and most tools are all thumbs when trying to precisely place a tiny micromachined part into a MEMS (micro electromechanical system) or MOEMS (optical MEMS) device. Researchers in [...]

The reason we have so many different ways to move fluids in labs-on-chips and other microfluidic devices is that we are still looking. Moving tiny amounts of fluid around, under [...]

Untangling the mixed signals of multiplexed messages is a big job and, until now, has been job enough for demultiplexers. Now Purdue engineers have found another task for them. The [...]

Many labs are still working with the idea of getting an organic polymer to carry electricity at all. But we do have devices taking advantage of the comparative ease of [...]

Fifteen years into the age of high-temperature superconductivity, the potential giant, expected to conquer the costs of electric power transmission, seemed dormant. There had not been much in the way [...]

These could be just what the technology of molecular electronics, struggling to get going, needs. Researchers at Georgia Tech have a new class of nanoscale structure that could be the [...]

Quite frequently the building of a device requires that you start with a silicon wafer surface that is atomically smooth--you need this kind of perfection for sharp interfaces. That's easier [...]

Getting rid of the waste products from any process is a nuisance and expense. Getting rid of nuclear fuel reprocessing wastes is a nightmare. The hazardous wastes include strontium-90, a [...]

More and more organizations are exploiting the benefits of globally dispersed product development teams. Input from individuals located in different parts of the world effectively extends the local presence of [...]

Holography joined the growing list of instant products and services in May 1999, when P.S. Ramanujam and colleagues at Risoe National Lab in Denmark developed azobenzene--a photosensitive polymer--as a recording [...]

To minimize corrosion, it's best to catch rust right when it starts. When investigating several conventional touchtype corrosion sensors that are keyed off the difference between the electrical characteristics of [...]

A novel high-performance active mass driver (HP-AMD) system designed by civil engineers at National Chiao-Tung University in Taiwan could eventually help prevent the kind of massive destruction that devastated that [...]

At a time of heightened fears about how legitimate a driver's license or other identification may be, researchers in Israel and Connecticut have come up with a way that should [...]

Any time you find a new way to get a liquid to move when and where you want, you are going to impact a lot of technologies. Lehigh University chemical [...]