Briefs: Medical
Spheroids of corneal tissue about 5 mm in diameter have been grown in a bioreactor from an in vitro culture of primary rabbit corneal cells to illustrate the production of optic cells from aggregates and tissue. In comparison with corneal tissues previously grown in vitro by other techniques,...
Briefs: Materials
A temperature- and time-dependent mathematical model predicts the conditions for failure of a material subjected to multiaxial stress. The model was initially applied to a filled epoxy...
Briefs: Materials
Fire-extinguishing agents comprising microscopic drops of water micro- encapsulated in flame-retardant polymers have been proposed as effective, less toxic, non-ozone- depleting, non-global- warming alternatives to prior fire-extinguishing agents. Among the prior fire-extinguishing agents...
Briefs: Materials
Multiterminal carbon-nanotube junctions are under investigation as candidate components of nanoscale electronic devices and circuits. Three-terminal "Y" junctions of carbon nanotubes...
Briefs: Materials
Zirconia stabilized with both scandia and yttria in suitable proportions has shown promise of being a superior thermal-barrier coating (TBC) material, relative to zirconia stabilized with yttria only. More specifically, a range of compositions in the zirconia/scandia/yttria material system...
Briefs: Robotics, Automation & Control
The designers and manufacturers of fuel cells are continually striving to improve the efficiency of their products. A design challenge facing the engineer relates to...
Articles: Photonics/Optics
No single image sensor will ever satisfy the diverse requirements of all industrial camera applications. The characteristics of higher resolution, faster speed, and a wide dynamic range are, however, increasingly...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
A document proposes the use of neutral-axis springs to augment the unfolding torques of hinges that are integral parts of thin-wall composite-material booms used to deploy scientific instruments from spacecraft. A spring according to the proposal would most likely be made of metal and could be...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
A report describes improvements over the conventional Whipple shield (two thin, spaced aluminum walls) for protecting spacecraft against high-speed impacts of orbiting debris. The debris in question arise mainly from breakup of older spacecraft. The improved shields include exterior "bumper"...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
A device that enables the automated cutting and transfer of plant shoots is undergoing development for use in the propagation of plants in a nursery or laboratory. At present, it is...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Six classes of diffraction-based optoelectronic instruments have been invented as means for wavelength-based processing of light. One family of anticipated applications lies in scientific instrumentation for studying chemical and physical reactions that affect and/or are affected...
Briefs: Research Lab
A mathematical formalism has been developed for predicting the postinstability motions of a dynamic system governed by a system of nonlinear equations and subject to initial conditions. Previously, there was no general method for prediction and mathematical modeling of postinstability...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
PC-based machine vision systems are becoming more powerful as the individual components that comprise them increase in performance. This has allowed for more complex algorithms to be developed...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
An improved version of an optoelectronic apparatus for measuring distances of the order of tens of feet with an error no larger than a small fraction of an inch (a few millimeters) has...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
The ability to detect the temperature differences of objects is vitally important to firefighters, who must often open doors that lead to fires and identify the seat and extension...
Briefs: Information Technology
The concept of the active state model (ASM) is an architecture for the development of advanced integrated fault-detection- and-isolation (FDI) systems for robotic land vehicles, pilotless aircraft,...
Briefs: Information Technology
The investment in established codes is preserved as modern capabilities are added.
An incremental approach to modernization of scientific software written in the Fortran 77 computing language has been developed. This approach makes it possible to preserve the investment in legacy Fortran software while augmenting...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Sensor packages that would be dropped from airplanes have been proposed for pre-eruption monitoring of physical conditions on the flanks of awakening volcanoes. The purpose of such...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
An effort is under way to develop capacitive sensors for measuring the masses of cryogenic fluids in tanks. These sensors are intended to function in both microgravitational and normal...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Microstrip patch antennas of a proposed type would be tunable over broad wavelength ranges. These antennas would be attractive for use in a variety of microwave communication systems in which there are...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
An ultra-high-frequency microstrip-patch antenna has been built for use in airborne synthetic-aperture radar (SAR). The antenna design satisfies requirements specific to the GeoSAR...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
A monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) that includes a high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) has been developed as a prototype of improved frequency doublers for generating signals at frequencies...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Circuit boards that contain radio-frequency (RF) and digital circuitry have been developed by NASA to satisfy a requirement of the Port of Houston Authority for relatively inexpensive Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers that indicate the azimuthal headings as well as the positions of ships. The...
Briefs: Software
The Information Power Grid Virtual Laboratory (ILab) is a Practical Extraction and Reporting Language (PERL) graphical-user-interface computer program that generates shell scripts to facilitate parametric studies performed on the Grid. ("The Grid" denotes a worldwide network of supercomputers used for...
Briefs: Software
Unsteady Flow Analysis Toolkit (UFAT) is a computer program that synthesizes motions of time-dependent flows represented by very large sets of data generated in computational fluid dynamics simulations. Prior to the development of UFAT, it was necessary to rely on static, single-snapshot...
Briefs: Software
A computer program generates a graphical user interface that, in combination with its other features, facilitates the acquisition and preprocessing of experimental data on the strain response, hysteresis, and power consumption of a multilayer composite-material structural component containing...
Briefs: Software
COBRA-AHS is a package of advanced software for analysis of rigid or flexible shaft systems supported by rolling-element bearings operating at high speeds under complex mechanical and thermal loads. These loads can include centrifugal and thermal loads generated by motions of...
Briefs: Software
WIGLAF (a Web Interface Generator and Legacy Application Façade) is a computer program that provides a Webbased, distributed, graphical-user-interface (GUI) framework that can be adapted to any of a broad range of application programs, written in any programming language, that are executed...
Briefs: Software
An open source computer program has been developed to satisfy a need for simplified organization of structured input data for scientific simulation programs. Typically, such input data are parsed in from a flat American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text file into...