A revolutionary material that will replace steel in warhead casings will bring added lethality and increase the likelihood of a hit on an enemy target, the Office of Naval Research has announced.
By combining several metals with standard manufacturing techniques, High-Density Reactive Material (HDRM) has the potential to dramatically increase the explosive impact of most weapons with little or no compromise in strength or design.
Advances in computer animation and simulation, high dynamic range 3D displays, and text-art design tools are being presented by UBC researchers at the world's largest computer graphics conference, being held in Vancouver this week.
Among the technology and findings being presented by UBC computer scientists at SIGGRAPH 2011 at the Vancouver Convention Centre, August 7 to 11:
WASHINGTON, D.C. (August 8, 2011)—Peak petroleum—the point at which the maximum rate of global oil extraction is reached, after which the rate of production begins to decline—is a hot topic in scientific and energy circles. When will it occur? What will the impact be? While geologists and economists debate the specifics, American University School of Communication professor Matthew Nisbet believes peak petroleum and the associated risks to public health may provide an opportunity to bring conservatives and liberals together in the move toward alternative forms of energy.
PITTSBURGH—A new tactile technology developed at Disney Research, Pittsburgh (DRP), called Surround Haptics, makes it possible for video game players and film viewers to feel a wide variety of sensations, from the smoothness of a finger being drawn against skin to the jolt of a collision.
Physicists at UC San Diego have developed a new kind of X-ray microscope that can penetrate deep within materials like Superman's fabled X-ray vision and see minute details at the scale of a single nanometer, or one billionth of a meter.
But that's not all. What's unusual about this new, nanoscale, X-ray microscope is that the images are not produced by a lens, but by means of a powerful computer program.
In what represents an important step toward curing HIV, a USC scientist has created a virus that hunts down HIV-infected cells.
Dr. Pin Wang's lentiviral vector latches onto HIV-infected cells, flagging them with what is called "suicide gene therapy" — allowing drugs to later target and destroy them.
"If you deplete all of the HIV-infected cells, you can at least partially solve the problem," said Wang, chemical engineering professor with the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.
The use of GPS technology to monitor sex offenders should be viewed as a tool rather than a control mechanism, a team of researchers at Sam Houston State University found in a recent study.
PITTSBURGH—Traditional motion capture techniques use cameras to meticulously record the movements of actors inside studios, enabling those movements to be translated into digital models. But by turning the cameras around — mounting almost two dozen, outward-facing cameras on the actors themselves — scientists at Disney Research, Pittsburgh (DRP), and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have shown that motion capture can occur almost anywhere — in natural environments, over large areas and outdoors.
In Anna Gudmundsdottir's laboratory at the University of Cincinnati, dedicated researchers endeavor to tame the extremely reactive chemicals known as radicals.
Highly reactive radicals are atoms, molecules or ions frantically trying to become something else. Their lifetimes are measured in fractions of seconds and typically occur in the middle of a chain of chemical reactions. They are also known as reactive intermediates. Much of Gudmundsdottir's work has focused on a family of radicals known as triplet nitrenes.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — A repellant for sea lampreys could be the key to better controlling one of the most destructive invasive species in the Great Lakes, says a Michigan State University researcher.
Scientists have seen the effect alarm cues have on lampreys. When scents from dead sea lampreys are poured into a tank of live ones, the lampreys' efforts to escape are dramatic. In the past, these reactions were simply dismissed as novel. But Michael Wagner, MSU assistant professor of fisheries and wildlife, sees this reaction as a potential game changer.
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, San Diego have discovered a way to prevent light signals on a silicon chip from reflecting backwards and interfering with its operation. Otherwise, the light beams would interfere with lasers and other photonic components on the chip and make the chip unstable. The breakthrough marks a significant achievement in the development of integrated photonic chips that could replace electronic chips as the backbone of information technology. Their findings are published Aug. 5 in the journal Science.
PASADENA, Calif.—Stretching for thousands of miles beneath oceans, optical fibers now connect every continent except for Antarctica. With less data loss and higher bandwidth, optical-fiber technology allows information to zip around the world, bringing pictures, video, and other data from every corner of the globe to your computer in a split second. But although optical fibers are increasingly replacing copper wires, carrying information via photons instead of electrons, today's computer technology still relies on electronic chips.
There is a new way to design computer chips and electronic circuitry for extreme environments: make them out of diamond.
A team of electrical engineers at Vanderbilt University has developed all the basic components needed to create microelectronic devices out of thin films of nanodiamond. They have created diamond versions of transistors and, most recently, logical gates, which are a key element in computers.
The avatar is displayed on the monitor of the Audi Mulitmedia Interface that comes standard in all new Audi models. The virtual figure understands complete sentences. Using artificial intelligence, AviCoS interprets questions by the vehicle occupants and answers in spoken language. The driver can view descriptive images or videos on-screen and the avatar points to the relevant areas during the explanation.
Surgeons at the University of Kentucky on Aug. 3 announced that they were among the first to use artificial-lung technology to demonstrate the feasibility of a lung transplant, using a device invented by two university faculty members, Dr. Joseph Zwischenberger and Dr. Dongfang Wang.