Though you might curse them at every red light, city planners do try to synchronize traffic signals to improve flow, even relying on supercomputers to design the optimal patterns. Lights stay green longer during peak traffic hours, and computer models help prioritize public transit. But variables like pedestrians in crosswalks, large crowds and vehicle wrecks [...]
DARPA has asked a lot from the science and tech communities, requesting everything from flying cars to weather manipulation to suspended animation. Now they’ve asked UC Santa Cruz researchers to slow down the speed of light, and in a breakthrough that could reshape optical communications, researchers have done exactly that. Built into a silicon chip, [...]
Eat your heart out, Wolverine. The X-Men superhero won’t be the only one with metal fused into his skeleton if a new titanium foam proves suitable for replacing and strengthening damaged bones. Bone implants are typically made of solid metal — usually titanium. Though well tolerated by the body, such implants are significantly stiffer than [...]
Most wind farms consist of horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWTs) due to the high power coefficient (mechanical power output divided by the power of the free-stream air through the turbine cross-sectional area) of an isolated turbine. However when in close proximity to neighboring turbines, HAWTs suffer from a reduced power coefficient. In contrast, previous research [...]
A detailed account of a recently developed method to quantify the registry mismatch in layered materials is presented. The registry index, which was originally defined for planar hexagonal boron-nitride, is extended to treat graphitic systems and generalized to describe multi-layered nanotubes. It is shown that using simple geometric considerations it is possible to capture the [...]
Optically induced ultrafast electronic excitations with sufficiently long lifetimes may cause strong effects on phase transitions like structural and nonmetal to metal ones. Examples are transitions diamond to graphite, graphite to graphene, non-metal to metal, solid to liquid, and vapor to liquid/solid. A spectacular case is photo-induced water condensation. These non-equilibrium transitions are an ultrafast [...]
The surprising discovery of superconductivity in layered iron-based materials, with transition temperatures climbing as high as 55 K, has lead to thousands of publications on this subject over the past two years. While there is general consensus on the unconventional nature of the Cooper pairing state of these systems, several central questions remain — including [...]
“Artificial skin” that could bring a sensitive touch to robots and prosthetic limbs, has been shown off. The materials can sense pressure as sensitively and quickly as human skin. The skins are arrays of small pressure sensors that convert tiny changes in pressure into electrical signals. The arrays are built into or under flexible rubber [...]
Researchers have demonstrated tiny solar cells just billionths of a meter across that can repair themselves, extending their useful lifetime. The cells make use of proteins from the machinery of plants, turning sunlight into electric charges that can do work. The cells simply assemble themselves from a mixture of the proteins, minute tubes of carbon [...]
Microscopic compositional distributions are important in determining the bulk properties of materials. In one application dealing with anticorrosive primers for metals, the distributions of corrosion inhibitor and filler particles in a polymer matrix are major factors governing the degree of protection under corrosive conditions. In another application in the field of geosciences, knowledge of the [...]