Ames Laboratory

Has the potential for widespread applications from the micro- to macroscale Inspired by a toy, the ‘buckliball’ — a collapsible structure fabricated from a single piece of material — represents a new class of 3-D, origami-like structures. Motivated by the desire to determine the simplest 3-D structure that could take advantage of mechanical instability to

Who knew leaks could be costing Americans $5 billion every year? And that’s not water leaks — it’s leaks you can’t even see. Typical air duct systems, both residential and commercial, typically lose 25-40 percent of heating and cooling energy, accounting for billions added to utility bills. But what if there was a simple mist

The invention recieved a national patent and soon will begin clinical trials   Saint John hospital medical team from Romania invention, was awarded the gold medal in 2010 at the Geneva Exhibition of Inventions , by which the patient own body is used for dialysis, namely the peritoneum. The invention recieved a national patent and soon will begin clinical trials . “We are very happy. We have already received

The area of the globe covered by wetlands (swamps, marshes, lakes, etc.) has dropped by 6% in fifteen years. This decline is particularly severe in tropical and subtropical regions, and in areas that have experienced the largest increases in population in recent decades. Read more . . . via Science Daily The Latest Global News:

IN THE end, the robots won. On December 3rd, Google announced that it was radically changing its ReCAPTCHA system, the sort of prove-you’re-a-human-and-not-automated-software test that has become all but ubiquitous online. In April, Google researchers published a paper showing that their computer-vision software could decipher their own squashed and twisted images 99.8% of the time. For many,

The world is one step closer to the day when people can, in good conscience, drive to work while sipping coffee, texting with a friend and working on a laptop computer. On Friday, Google announced that sometime this summer several prototype versions of its self-driving cars are set to hit the streets of Mountain View,

Engineers in the Coordinated Robotics Lab at the University of California, San Diego, have developed new image processing techniques for rapid exploration and characterization of structural fires by small Segway-like robotic vehicles. A sophisticated on-board software system takes the thermal data recorded by the robot’s small infrared camera and maps it onto a 3D scene

Columns of workers penetrate the forest, furiously gathering as much food and supplies as they can. They are a massive army that living things know to avoid, and that few natural obstacles can waylay. So determined are these legions that should a chasm or gap disrupt the most direct path to their spoils they simply

Although cobwebs may seem very fragile when we see people like Indiana Jones crashing through them, the fact is that spider silk is an incredibly strong and flexible material. It has a tensile strength similar to that of high-grade steel while only being one-fifth as dense, it can stretch up to 1.4 times its relaxed length

Discovery could lead to major efficiencies and cost savings Using one of the largest supercomputers in the world, a team of researchers led by the University of Minnesota has identified potential materials that could improve the production of ethanol and petroleum products. The discovery could lead to major efficiencies and cost savings in these industries.