Tech

Gimball bumps into and ricochets off of obstacles, rather than avoiding them. This 34 centimeter in diameter spherical flying robot buzzes around the most unpredictable, chaotic environments, without the need for fragile detection sensors. This resiliency to injury, inspired by insects, is what sets it apart from other flying robots. Gimball is protected by a spherical, elastic cage which enables it to absorb and rebound from shocks. It keeps its balance using a gyroscopic stabilization system.

Exploratory research on revolutionary new types of nuclear fuel pellets that would be safer in the event of a nuclear disaster has yielded promising results, according to a team of scientists from the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Americans consume an enormous amount of media daily via television, radio, phone and computer. As you read this article on the Internet, perhaps while checking the text messages on your smartphone or listening to satellite radio, that statement undoubtedly rings true. But exactly how much media flows to individuals and households in a year? Try 6.9 zettabytes — that's 6.9 million MILLION gigabytes.

Crime-scene investigators may soon have a new tool to help them catch evildoers. Researchers have demonstrated the proof-of-principle for a new forensic technique to identify individual fibers of cloth, which often all look alike.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Gems are known for the beauty of the light that passes through them. But it is the fixed atomic arrangements of these crystals that determine the light frequencies permitted passage.

Now a Sandia-led team has created a plasmonic, or plasma-containing, crystal that is tunable. The effect is achieved by adjusting a voltage applied to the plasma. Because the crystal then is agile in transmitting terahertz light at varying frequencies, it could increase the bandwidth of high-speed communication networks and generally enhance high-speed electronics.

Washington, DC—For the first time, researchers have been able to map the true extent of gold mining in the biologically diverse region of Madre De Dios in the Peruvian Amazon. The team combined field surveys with airborne mapping and high-resolution satellite monitoring to show that the geographic extent of mining has increased 400% from 1999 to 2012 and that the average annual rate of forest loss has tripled since the Great Recession of 2008. Until this study, thousands of small, clandestine mines that have boomed since the economic crisis have gone unmonitored.

The ability to shrink laboratory-scale processes to automated chip-sized systems would revolutionize biotechnology and medicine. For example, inexpensive and highly portable devices that process blood samples to detect biological agents such as anthrax are needed by the U.S. military and for homeland security efforts. One of the challenges of "lab-on-a-chip" technology is the need for miniaturized pumps to move solutions through micro-channels.

URBANA, Ill. – In the chemical age of agriculture that began in the 1960s, potassium chloride (KCl), the common salt often referred to as potash, is widely used as a major fertilizer in the Corn Belt without regard to the huge soil reserves that were once recognized for their fundamental importance to soil fertility.

University of Cincinnati researchers are blending technology with tradition, as they discover new and improved methods for mapping landscapes. The research is newly published in the Journal of Applied Geography (Vol. 45, December 2013) by UC authors Jacek Niesterowicz, a doctoral student in the geography department, and Professor Tomasz Stepinski, the Thomas Jefferson Chair of Space Exploration in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences (A&S).

Boulder, Colo., USA - After 10 years of production, shale gas in the United States cannot be considered commercially viable, according to several scientists presenting at the Geological Society of America meeting in Denver on Monday. They argue that while the use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling for "tight oil" is an important contributor to U.S. energy supply, it is not going to result in long-term sustainable production or allow the U.S. to become a net oil exporter.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Everybody's experienced it: a miserable backup on the freeway, which you think must be caused by an accident or construction, but which at some point thins out for no apparent reason.

Such "traffic flow instabilities" have been a subject of scientific study since the 1930s, but although there are a half-dozen different ways to mathematically model them, little has been done to prevent them.

Fluid jets are all around us: from inkjet printing, to the "Old Faithful" geyser in Yellowstone National Park, to cosmological jets several thousand light years long.

A Northwestern University researcher with collaborators from Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Centro Nacional de Biotecnología have recently verified the classical Landau-Squire theory in the tiniest submerged jet. The diameter of their jets were in the range of 20 to 150 nanometers, which is the length of just a few hundred water molecules lined up in a row.

In the early morning hours of Oct. 18, NASA's Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) made history, transmitting data from lunar orbit to Earth at a rate of 622 Megabits-per-second (Mbps). That download rate is more than six times faster than previous state-of-the-art radio systems flown to the moon.

Spending time immersed as a virtual character or avatar in a role-playing video game can numb you to realizing important body signals in real life. This message comes from Ulrich Weger of the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany and Stephen Loughnan of Melbourne University in Australia, in an article in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, published by Springer.

New research from North Carolina State University and the University of Minnesota finds that people in the United States want labels on food products that use nanotechnology – whether the nanotechnology is in the food or is used in food packaging. The research also shows that many people are willing to pay more for the labeling.