Tech

Decades after the bullets have stopped flying, wars can leave behind a lingering danger: land mines that harm civilians and render land unusable for agriculture. Left over minefields are a danger throughout the world but now researchers in Scotland have designed a new device that could more reliably sense explosives, helping workers to identify and deactivate unexploded mines.

Optical cloaking devices that enable light to gracefully slip around a solid object were once strictly in the realm of science fiction. Today they have emerged as an exciting area of study, at least on microscopic scales. A new twist on this technology can now be "seen" in the field of acoustics.

A team of researchers from the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and the Universidad de Valencia have created a prototype of an acoustic cloak by using a 2-D mathematical model.

A new computer model that describes the evolution of the Internet's architecture suggests that a process similar to natural evolution took place to determine which protocols survived and which ones became extinct. Understanding the evolution may help the designers of future Internet architectures - as long as you believe you can guide evolution, that is.

Risø DTU has made its eighth report in the series: 'Nuclear power and Nuclear Safety', which gives a global overview of nuclear energy with a focus on safety and preparedness. This year's report is a bit delayed because of the accident in Fukushima, which is also mentioned in the report that would normally cover only the year 2010.

The change in energy policy has been decided; Germany needs more green energy. From Sep. 5-9 in Hamburg, everything will revolve around our biggest energy supplier: the sun. At the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, in Hall B4G, Stand C12, Fraunhofer researchers will present new methods for making solar cells cheaper and more efficient.

Personal photos occupy an ever-expanding amount of hard drive space. Baby, family and vacation photos can now number in the thousands. While some poke fun at the digital glut, others see a unique opportunity.

Researchers at the University of Washington have created a way to take hundreds or thousands of digital portraits and in seconds create an animation of the person's face.

The tool can make a face appear to age over time, or choose images from the same period to make the person's expression gradually change from a smile to a frown.

MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (08/11/2011) —Computer science researchers in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering are leading a team that has confirmed a substantial gender gap among editors of Wikipedia and a corresponding gender-oriented disparity in the content. The team’s research will be presented at the 2011 WikiSym conference, the seventh annual International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, in California this fall.

One of the earliest lessons in science that students learn is that a ray or beam of light travels in a straight line. Students also learn that light rays fan out or diffract as they travel. Recently it was discovered that light rays can travel without diffraction in a curved arc in free space. These rays of light were dubbed “Airy beams,” after the English astronomer Sir George Biddell Airy, who studied what appears to be the parabolic trajectory of light in a rainbow.

Face recognition software of the kind incorporated into biometric identification tools, photo-gallery applications and social media websites can be very useful but the technology raises privacy concerns, given the seeming ease with which faces in photos can now be tied to an individual. Researchers in Russia and Poland hope to take face recognition technology an important step forward with the even more powerful software they have developed.

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.

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.

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.

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.