Engineering – Page 19

Alternative Transportation, Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, Science & Technology News, Space, Space Flight

Can we get into space without big rockets?

September 4, 2018

Since humans began putting satellites into orbit in the 1950s, we’ve relied upon big, powerful rockets to escape Earth’s gravity and get into space. But big rockets have a major downside, in that they make space launches expensive. Case in point: NASA’s Space Launch System heavy lift rocket, which is scheduled for its maiden flight in December 2019, will cost an estimated $1 billion per launch, according to a 2017 report by NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG). Launch costs for SpaceX’s far more economical Falcon Heavy, which launched successfully from Kennedy Space Center in February 2018, still range between $90 million and $150 million for a fully expendable, maxed-out version, according to CNBC.

For decades, however, visionaries have looked for ways to get into space without relying — at least not primarily — upon rocket power.

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AI, Education, Engineering, IBM Watson

IBM’s Holodeck-style classroom tech makes language-learning apps look primitive

September 3, 2018

Whether it’s apps like Duolingo or the ease of travel, there are plenty of ways technology has made it more straightforward to learn a second (or third or fourth …) language. Now, IBM Research and New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with an entirely new high-tech approach — and it totally reminds us of the Vulcan school from 2009’s Star Trek movie.

Called the Cognitive Immersive Room (CIR), it pairs an A.I.-powered chatbot smart assistant with a 360-degree panoramic display system to place users into a variety of immersive locations to try out their language skills. Currently, it’s being used for Mandarin, which is widely considered to be among the more difficult languages for Westerners to learn. The CIR setup drops students into scenarios like a restaurant in China and a tai chi class, where they can put their Mandarin to the test.

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Architecture, Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, Great New Product, Housing

New “Super Wood” is as strong as steel

September 3, 2018

Wood is great. It looks nice as a building material. It grows right out of the ground. But compared to things like concrete, marble, and steel, it’s not all that strong. Well, it didn’t used to be, anyway. Scientists have now created a “super wood” that’s strong enough to stop a bullet.

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Biotech, Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, Medical Breakthrough

The high-stakes race to create the world’s first artificial heart

August 26, 2018

World-famous Houston surgeon Bud Frazier spent decades developing a revolutionary device that could save millions of lives. In this exclusive excerpt from ‘Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart,’ he attempts to implant it in a human for the first

The kids fell in love with him first. Back in the late eighties, Craig Lewis lived three houses down from Linda Sanders. He was a quiet, solitary beanpole of a man with a copper-colored golden retriever named Shogun. He looked to be in his late thirties, and Linda knew from neighborhood gossip that he had one marriage behind him, just like she did. Back then, Shogun seemed to be his constant companion. Craig had taught that dog to do just about anything; of course he could sit, stay, and fetch, but he also knew how to play hide-and-seek with even the canniest kid. That was why, as soon as Linda’s children saw Craig’s pickup pull into his driveway in the early evenings, they were out the door. Leslie was six and Eddie four, two blond-haired kids on the run, raising small clouds of dust as their feet slapped the parched summer grass. “Don’t wear out your welcome!” Linda warned to the sliding door they slammed behind them.

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Engineering, Great New Product, Inventions

Cracked smartphone screens are about to become a thing of the past

August 23, 2018

Changes in design and materials are good news for those of us with slippery fingers.

One of the biggest problems with smartphones is that they break. Screens are the most common culprit—smashed and cracked displays make up roughly 50 percent of all smartphone repairs. Water damage, malfunctioning charging ports or connectors, or nonfunctioning buttons are also popular reasons smartphone owners head to the repair shop. While talk of planned obsolescence—the idea that smartphone-makers purposefully design their products to eventually fail, forcing you to upgrade to a newer model—often comes up, these issues just happen with use over time. Over the past few years, smartphone companies have been taking small steps to make their phones more durable. Now, it seems we may be commencing an era of nearly unbreakable phones as hardware-makers develop less fragile display and body materials and continue to shore up devices against threats like dust and water.

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Engineering, Inventions, Nanotechnology

German researchers have built a quantum transistor using just a single atom

August 22, 2018

A team of researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology have developed a quantum transistor using just a single atom, and capable of operating at room temperature.

The device points toward major new frontiers in computing power and efficiency. Transistors, which control the flow of electronic signals, are the basis of modern electronics. The steady reduction in the size and energy consumption of transistors has been the fundamental driver of advances in computing power for more than half a century.

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Biotech, Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, new technology

A new way to ‘freeze’ water could help transform organ preservation

August 21, 2018

Freezing can be a great way of preserving assorted foodstuffs or biological tissues and organs, but it’s not without its risks. The formation of sharp ice crystals can damage cell membranes, while the defrosting process comes with its own potential dangers.

Scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the original and largest teaching hospital at Harvard Medical School, may have changed the game with a new piece of research, however. They have developed a method of maintaining water and water-based solutions in their liquid form for long periods of time, at temperatures far below the usual freezing point. The breakthrough could have major implications for long-term safe preservation of everything from blood cells and organs to the food we eat.

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Biotech, cutting edge, Engineering, Healthcare

Don’t bug out: Spider-like microbots will get under your skin … in a good way

August 20, 2018

It might sound like the beginning of a nightmare, but researchers are developing a line of small, insect-inspired robots that could one day crawl into your body and help fix broken bits. They’re suspicious in their squishiness. Soft, flexible, and shaped like spiders. But their creators think future versions could be designed to perform tasks that are out of reach of humans.

In a paper published recently in the journal Advanced Materials, a team of roboticists from Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston University report that they’ve created these multifunctional microbots thanks to a new fabrication process that lets them build millimeter-scale machines with micrometer-scale features. Similarly sized robots have been created before, but not ones as dynamic as this. To demonstrate their breakthrough, they created a transparent spider bot modeled off of the brilliant Australian peacock spider.

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Engineering, Fashion, Wearables

The first graphene jacket is here, and it’s magical

August 17, 2018

At 595 euros ($695) a pop, Vollebak’s new graphene jacket isn’t for everyone. But if even half of what its creators promise is true, it could be worth every cent. According to the company, it shares many of the magical properties of graphene–absorbing heat and then warming you up over time, conducting electricity, repelling bacteria, and dissipating your body’s excess humidity. According to Vollebak, it’s the world’s first jacket made out of the notoriously difficult-to-manufacture material.

Graphene is the thinnest possible form of graphite, which you can find in your everyday pencil. It’s purely bi-dimensional, a single layer of carbon atoms that has unbelievable properties that will one day revolutionize everything from aerospace engineering to medicine. Its diverse uses are seemingly endless: It can stop a bullet if you add enough layers. It can change the color of your hair with no adverse effects. It can turn the walls of your home into a giant fire detector. “It’s so strong and so stretchy that the fibers of a spider web coated in graphene could catch a falling plane,” as Vollebak puts it in its marketing materials.

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Engineering, Ford Motor Company, Robotics

The worker in the robot suit: New industrial orders reignite exoskeleton interest

August 14, 2018

It’s been a technology without a clear customer for about a decade, but wearable robotic suits are finally finding a market in legacy manufacturing and construction.

Robotic exoskeletons are back in the news after Ford ordered 75 robotic suits from Ekso Bionics, as reported by my colleague.

The relatively small number of orders belies the significance of this moment for a fantastically advanced set of technologies that have been searching for a viable market for over a decade now. Wearable robots that augment human strength have attracted big investment money, but the use case has been harder to pinpoint.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, Inventions, new technology

Cell-sized robots can sense their environment

August 4, 2018

Made of electronic circuits coupled to minute particles, the devices could flow through intestines or pipelines to detect problems.

Researchers at MIT have created what may be the smallest robots yet that can sense their environment, store data, and even carry out computational tasks. These devices, which are about the size of a human egg cell, consist of tiny electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials, piggybacking on minuscule particles called colloids.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Energy, Engineering, new technology

Will Lockheed Martin change the world with its new fusion reactor?

August 1, 2018

TEXAS, USA – JUNE 21: A F-35 fighter jet is seen as Turkey takes delivery of its first F-35 fighter jet with a ceremony at the Lockheed Martin in Forth Worth, Texas, United States on June 21, 2018. (Photo by Atilgan Ozdil/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunkworks laboratory registered a patent in March for a revolutionary technology that could solve the world’s energy problems for good – but don’t pop the champagne yet. The design is for a compact fusion reactor (CFR) which theoretically produces cheap, clean, near limitless energy – all from a device that could fit on the back of a semi. If it sounds far-fetched, that’s because it is. The sustained generation of a fusion reaction has evaded scientists since the idea was first conceived over 70 years ago.

Lockheed Martin thinks they can change that.

Continue reading… “Will Lockheed Martin change the world with its new fusion reactor?”