Topic

To make a silicon solar cell, you start with a slice of highly purified silicon crystal, and then process it through several stages involving gradual heating and cooling. But figuring out the tradeoffs involved in selecting the purity level of the starting silicon wafer — and then exactly how much to heat...

All across America, trucks and tractor-trailers are transporting industrial explosives such as munitions, rocket motors, and dynamite on nearly every artery of the country’s interstate and highway system. America’s track record in transporting these materials is about as...

Simulated surgeries are a great tool for training surgical residents — but does a tool exist to determine precisely when a surgical resident is ready to move on to operate on a human patient? With this question in mind, an interdisciplinary team of University of Houston computer scientists and...

Engineering researchers at the University of Michigan designed a device that harvests energy from the reverberation of heartbeats through the chest and converts it to electricity to run a pacemaker or an implanted defibrillator. These mini-medical machines send electrical signals...

University of California, San Diego bioengineers have developed a self-healing hydrogel that binds in seconds, like Velcro, and forms a bond strong enough to withstand repeated stretching. The material has numerous potential applications, including medical sutures, targeted drug delivery, industrial sealants,...

Following an orthopedic procedure, surgeons usually rely on X-rays or MRIs to monitor the progress of their patients' recovery. A new implantable sensor developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute could provide surgeons with detailed, real-time information from the actual...

Although often curable if detected early, melanoma causes the deaths of nearly 9,000 Americans each year. The incidence of melanoma is increasing at a rate faster than that of any of the seven most common cancers. A new medical diagnostic device invented by John A. Viator, Ph.D, an...

Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS), a deep brain stimulation technique, uses electrodes to direct tiny painless currents across the brain. The currents are thought to improve the firing of neurons and the forming of connections that enable learning. The technique has shown potential in...

What if design engineers could work with and interact with assemblies with real-time feedback on the structural dynamics acting on the components? What if physics simulations, which currently take hours or days to compute, had so much processing power available that they can be...

The universal challenges faced by bike manufacturer Trek in creating a new-generation racing bike apply to many companies today: Create products that are sturdy yet use lightweight materials, spot design defects earlier in the design phase, and reduce time from sketch to physical prototype. Trek used...

COVER STORY + An Era of Opportunity: The International Space Station Begins its Next Stage of Partnership and Innovation FEATURE ARTICLES+ Biology in Orbit + Strange Behavior: The Odd Effects of Microgravity + An Emphasis on Partnership + Pen Caps & Nanoparticles: Education on the ISS +...

Offshore wind is an enormous potential resource for the United States - with strong, consistent winds located in the Atlantic, Pacific, the Great Lakes, and the Gulf of Mexico. As part of a planned six-year $180 million initiative, an initial $20 million will be available from the DOE this year as the first...

Each year, upwards of 1.5 million cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI) occur in the United States. Conventional imaging methods don't always provide physicians with as much detail as they would like when it comes to determining how the injury damaged the patient's brain tissue, predicting how the...

An impact model was developed to predict how three specific foam types would damage the Space Shuttle Orbiter insulating tiles. The inputs needed for the model are the foam type, the foam mass, the foam impact velocity, the foam impact incident angle, the type being impacted, and whether the tile is new or aged (has flown...

This document discusses a technique that provides a means for suspending large, awkward loads, instrument packages, components, and machinery in a stable, controlled, and precise manner. In the baseplate of the test machine, a pattern of grooves and...

A document describes a zeptobolometer for ultrasensitive, long-wavelength sensors. GSFC is developing pixels based on the zeptobolometer design that sense three THz wavelengths simultaneously.

A document describes a high-performance, modular, and state-of-the-art Command and Data Handling (C&DH) system developed for use on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) mission. This system implements a complete hardware C&DH subsystem in a single...

A document discusses an electro-optic sensor that consists of a collimator, attached to one segment, and a quad diode, attached to an adjacent segment. Relative segment-segment motion causes the beam from the collimator to move across the quad diode, thus generating a...