The Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship Program offers hands-on exposure to Air Force research challenges through eight- to twelve-week research residencies at participating Air Force Research Facilities for full-time science and engineering faculty at U.S. colleges and universities.  This program is administered by the American Society for Engineering Education, which provides the oversight and administrative [...]

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) sponsors a Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at a number of Naval R&D centers and laboratories.  The program is designed to significantly increase the involvement of creative and highly trained scientists and engineers from academia and industry to scientific and technical areas of interest and relevance to the Navy.  The NRL Postdoctoral [...]

by K. Kleiner NewScientist.com News Service, 25 Jul 2007 When it comes to using nanoscopic ribbons of graphene to make electronic circuits, researchers have discovered that size really does matter.  Supercomputer simulations of quantum mechanical behaviour suggest that not just the width, but also the length, of these atom-thin sheets of carbon determines whether they [...]

by S. Watcharotone et al. Nano Letters, 29 Jun 2007 (web) Transparent and electrically conductive composite silica films were fabricated on glass and hydrophilic SiOx/silicon substrates by incorporation of individual graphene oxide sheets into silica sols followed by spin-coating, chemical reduction, and thermal curing.  The resulting films were characterized by SEM, AFM, TEM, low-angle X-ray [...]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press Release, 23 Jul 2007 In an advance that could help curb global demand for oil, MIT researchers have demonstrated how ordinary spark-ignition automobile engines can, under certain driving conditions, move into a spark-free operating mode that is more fuel-efficient and just as clean.  The mode-switching capability could appear in production [...]

Massachusetts General Hospital Press Release, 23 Jul 2007 Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) surgeons have performed the first total hip replacement using a joint socket lined with a novel material invented at the MGH.  An advance over first-generation highly crosslinked polyethylene, which was also developed at MGH and significantly reduced a serious complication of early hip [...]

by V. Hinze-Hoare arXiv.org E-print Archive, 24 Jul 2007 The History of human-computer interaction (HCI) is briefly reviewed together with three HCI models and structure including computer-supported collaborative working, computer-supported collaborative learning, and computer-supported collaborative research.  It is shown that a number of authorities consider HCI to be a fragmented discipline with no agreed set [...]

by P. Wenger et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 25 Jul 2007 This paper describes a new parallel kinematic architecture for machining applications: the orthoglide.  This machine features three fixed parallel linear joints which are mounted orthogonally and a mobile platform which moves in the Cartesian x-y-z space with fixed orientation.  The main interest of the [...]

by M. Yuksel et al. arXiv.org E-print Archive, 22 Jul 2007 We consider a general multiple antenna network with multiple sources, multiple destinations and multiple relays in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT).  We examine several subcases of this most general problem taking into account the processing capability of the relays (half-duplex or full-duplex), and [...]

CNN.com, 24 Jul 2007 As the summer swelters on, skyscrapers and apartments around the city will crank up air conditioners and push the city’s power grid to the limit — but some have found a cool alternative.  Some office towers and buildings are keeping their AC use to a minimum by using an energy-saving system [...]