Not all potential invaders lurk inside cargo ships.  Many live in plain sight, clinging to vessels’ outer hulls.  From mussels to barnacles to algae, studies suggest that such hull-fouling organisms could pose an invasion threat that is as great as if not greater than that from ballast creatures, researchers say.  So far, however, regulators haven’t [...]

As cargo ships pump millions of liters of ballast in and out of their hulls, they also help spread sometimes microscopic stowaways, including invasive shellfish and algae that have damaged marine ecosystems and local economies worldwide.  Blocking these invasions is the goal of a science barge called the Mobile Ballast Water Treatment Test Platform.  Recently, [...]

The Directorate for Engineering at the National Science Foundation (NSF) has established a partnership with the Vehicle Technologies Program (VTP) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in order to address critical fundamental and applied research challenges associated with advanced combustion engine technologies.  The goal of the partnership is to leverage the complementary missions of [...]

An elderly woman is the recipient of the first-ever three dimensional (3-D) printed jawbone, made of titanium powder that was sintered together one layer at a time.  It restored the recipient’s facial esthetics and allowed her to regain her speech within hours.  It could pave the way for a new wave of 3-D printed body [...]

Osteophilic modular nanostructured multilayers containing hydroxyapatite nanoparticles complexed with a natural polymer chitosan create an osteoconductive surface for mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs).  Coupled with the sustained release of physiological amounts of osteoinductive bone morphogenetic protein over several days from degradable poly(β-amino ester) based multilayers, this single coating results in a synergistic accelerated and upregulated differentiation [...]

Incorporating active materials within fibers holds great promise for tunable, non-woven, optoelectronic textiles that can respond to external stimuli.  Previous studies have shown that light can be confined by infiltrating the microstructures with liquid crystal (LC) materials.  However, these fibers are mostly silica-based, and the LC material has generally been capillary-filled, limiting the length and [...]

Transparent conductors based on few-layer graphene (FLG) intercalated with ferric chloride (FeCl3) have an outstandingly low sheet resistance and high optical transparency.  FeCl3-FLGs outperform the current limit of transparent conductors such as indium tin oxide, carbon-nanotube films, and doped graphene materials.  This makes FeCl3-FLG materials the best transparent conductors for optoelectronic devices.  [Advanced Materials, 25 [...]

Construction management experts at the University of Calgary’s Schulich School of Engineering have developed a system that employs remote sensing technology to improve safety on construction sites by using tracking tags to monitor movements in real-time.  Knowing the precise location of people, equipment and building materials will reduce accidents and could also help prevent materials [...]

Robots need help navigating their surroundings and sophisticated location systems to keep track of their position.  Now the same technologies are being adapted to help blind people navigate indoor and outdoor spaces independently.  One such system, being developed by the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, [...]

The image fractal analysis is actively used in all science branches. In particular in materials science the fractal analysis is applied to study microstructure of deformed metals because its structure can be interpreted as the fractal image.  It is well known that such images can be described by fractal dimension.  In this paper, the fractal [...]