The car is racing far too fast toward the tail end of a traffic jam – a crash is inevitable. The inflated airbag can protect the car's occupants. But if the person in the passenger seat is leaning too far forward, perhaps looking for something in a bag in the foot space, the force of the airbag can cause injury.
Tech
Move your arm and the robot imitates your movement. This type of intuitive handling is now possible thanks to a new input device that will simplify the control of industrial robots in the future. But that is not all: The sensor system can also help regulate the movements of active prostheses. The new technology will be presented at the Sensor+Test trade fair from June 7-9 in Nuremberg.
Conserving energy is a top priority for auto manufacturers today. Laser technology can help. Lasers can be used to process thin light-weight components made of fiber-composite materials, as well as to manufacture more efficient engines and more powerful batteries. At the Laser 2011 trade fair May 23-26, Fraunhofer scientists will be presenting new production technologies in Hall C2, Stand 330 and Hall B2, Stand 417.
In this week's issue of the journal Science, MIT researchers and their colleagues at the University of Augsburg in Germany report the discovery of a new physical phenomenon that could yield transistors with greatly enhanced capacitance -- a measure of the voltage required to move a charge. And that, in turn, could lead to the revival of clock speed as the measure of a computer's power.
A Nordic multicentre study, headed by researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, shows that pelvic organ prolapse surgery using synthetic mesh can be more effective than traditional surgery. The advantages indicated by the study mainly concern restored genital anatomy and more efficient symptom relief, although there is an associated greater risk of complications. The study is published in the renowned scientific periodical The New England Journal of Medicine.
Fingerprints – dozens of crime dramas revolve around them. The investigators find the victim, dust for fingerprints, run them through a computer program and, voilá, the guilty party is quickly identified and sent to prison.
If only it were that easy. The reality is that often this common but crucial portion of an investigation is often done by humans, not by computers. An upcoming study in Psychological Science, reveals that the human factor in the process could lead to errors and incorrect conclusions.
This discovery will make it possible to improve photoelectrochemical cells. In the same way that plants use photosynthesis to transform sunlight into energy, these cells use sunlight to drive chemical reactions that ultimately produce hydrogen from water. The process involves using a light-sensitive semi-conducting material such as cuprous oxide to provide the current needed to fuel the reaction. Although it is not expensive, the oxide is unstable if exposed to light in water. Research by
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have defined a new class of software, calling it "surrogate interaction," which enables designers and video gamers to more easily change features of complex objects like automotive drawings or animated characters.
The new interactive approach is being used commercially and in research but until now has not been formally defined, and doing so could boost its development and number of applications, said Ji Soo Yi, an assistant professor of industrial engineering at Purdue University.
NEW YORK (May 9, 2011) -- Teenagers who drink alcohol spend more time on their computers for recreational use, including social networkingand downloading and listening to music, compared with their peers who don't drink.
Results of an anonymous survey of 264 teenagers were reported in the online edition of the journal Addictive Behaviors in a study authored by Weill Cornell Medical College public health researcher Dr. Jennifer Epstein.
For their experiments, the researchers attached a wedge-shaped block of wood to the head of their robot, which was built with seven connected segments, powered by servo motors, packed in a latex sock and wrapped in a spandex swimsuit. The doorstop-shaped head -- which resembled the sandfish's head -- had a fixed lower length of approximately 4 inches, height of 2 inches and a tapered snout. The researchers examined whether the robot's vertical motion could be controlled simply by varying the inclination of the robot's head.
PITTSBURGH—Digital imagery, Facebook updates, online music collections, email threads and other immaterial artifacts of today's online world may be as precious to teenagers as a favorite book that a parent once read to them or a t-shirt worn at a music festival, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers say.
Researchers from the Basque nanoscience research center CIC nanoGUNE and Neaspec GmbH (Germany) have developed an instrument that allows for recording infrared spectra with a thermal source at a resolution that is 100 times better than in conventional infrared spectroscopy. In future, the technique could be applied for analyzing the local chemical composition and structure of nanoscale materials in polymer composites, semiconductor devices, minerals or biological tissue. The work is published in Nature Materials.
An article in the current issue of Global Change Biology Bioenergy outlines a framework for evaluating biofuels in order to address ethical issues surrounding the rapidly evolving race to develop biofuels.
Tropical carpenter ants (Camponotus leonardi) live high up in the rainforest canopy. When infected by a parasitic fungus (Ophiocordyceps unilateralis) the behaviour of the ants is dramatically changed. They become erratic and zombie-like, and are manipulated by the fungus into dying at a spot that provides optimal conditions for fungal reproduction. New research, published in BioMed Central's open access journal BMC Ecology, looks at altered behaviour patterns in Zombie ants in Thailand and shows how the fungus manipulates ant behaviour.
Berkeley — Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have demonstrated a new technology for graphene that could break the current speed limits in digital communications.