3rd April 2008, 04:12 am
NASA’s solar-powered Helios experimental aircraft lifted off from a U.S. Navy base on the Hawaiian island of Kauai on Monday, reaching a height of 96,500 feet.
The $15 million aircraft failed in its attempt to reach an altitude of 100,000 feet, but it broke a record set by its predecessor, the Pathfinder Plus, for 80,201 feet for solar-powered and propeller-driven aircraft in 1998.
Officials decided to bring down the radio-controlled Helios at 4:08 p.m. Hawaii time (10:08 p.m. EDT), NASA spokesman Alan Brown told the Associated Press, as the craft had reached a “zero climb rate” in thinning air and slanting sunlight.
Continue reading ‘Flying Wing Surpasses Altitude Records for Non-Rocket Airplane’ »
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21st March 2008, 05:17 am
.. The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.
All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A ‘point-and-goto’ interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.
Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that’s not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.
Download:
Continue reading ‘Download Link for Celestia The Open Source Software’ »
16th March 2008, 11:12 am
The selection of technology greatly impacts the performance and functionality that can be expected from an integrated-circuit UHF RFID transponder.
Faisal Mohd-Yasin, M.B.I. Reaz, Y.K. Teh | ED Online ID #13722 | October 2006
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) transponder design techniques were introduced last month, in the opening installment of this two-part article series. This month more advanced methods will be explored for enhancing the performance of UHF RFID transponders, using four design examples in Germany, the United States, Italy, and Switzerland.
The German group was involved in pioneering work in UHF RFID, developing a variety of efficient circuit design techniques. However, their work required the use of a nonstandard 0.5-µm CMOS process. The US group proposed a low-cost design using Schottky diodes, employing novel data readout circuit and the capability of boosting the data rate to 10 Mb/s. The Italian group focused on low-power consumption and achieved submicrowatt power consumption with their digital module, based on AMI’s 0.5-µm CMOS process. The Swiss group developed their UHF RFID transponder using silicon-on-sapphire (SOS) technology and achieved the farthest detection range.
Continue reading ‘Develop Advanced Designs For RFID Transponders’ »
5th March 2008, 04:22 pm
Advances made in the field of nanotechnology could be applied in the development of a new generation of chemical and biological weapons, writes Andy Oppenheimer.
Current and future developments in nanotechnology—science and engineering on the scale of nanometres or billionths of a metre—may pave the way for new types of weapons. The new technology will have a profound impact on new materials, electronic devices, chemical, biological and mechanical systems and provides the potential for future weapons development. Previous articles on Janes Chem-Bio Web discussed the potential of nanotechnology being used for a fourth generation of nuclear weapons. This article deals with its potential to enable future production of novel chemical and biological weapons (CBW).
Dual-use medical advances
Nanotechnology has great potential in the fields of biotechnology and medicine. Bio-nanotechnology is concerned with molecular-scale properties and production of materials and devices including tissue and cellular engineering scaffolds, molecular motors and biomolecules for sensors and drug delivery. While bio-nanotechnological products are seen as around 10 years off, medical application is promising, with intense research being conducted in disease diagnosis, drug delivery and molecular imaging. Medical-related products containing nanoparticles are currently on the market in the US. DNA-based geometrical structures (including artificial crystals) and functioning DNA-based nanomachines are currently being fabricated.
Continue reading ‘Nanotechnology paves way for new weapons’ »
3rd March 2008, 08:04 pm
If you could hold a giant magnifying glass in space and focus all the sunlight shining toward Earth onto one grain of sand, that concentrated ray would approach the intensity of a new laser beam made in a University of Michigan laboratory.
“That’s the instantaneous intensity we can produce,” said Karl Krushelnick, a physics and engineering professor. “I don’t know of another place in the universe that would have this intensity of light. We believe this is a record.”
The pulsed laser beam lasts just 30 femtoseconds. A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second. The beam is twice as intense as one the researchers produced in 2004.
Such intense beams could help scientists develop better proton and electron beams for radiation treatment of cancer, among other applications.
Continue reading ‘Michigan Laser Beam Believed To Set Record For Intensity’ »
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20th February 2008, 06:59 am
By Kimberly Patch, Technology Research News
It turns out that butterflies’ fluttering is neither random nor clumsy.
Researchers from Oxford University in England have devised a method of studying the way butterflies fly, and their initial results show that the insects have many more tricks of flight than they get credit for.
The researchers trained red admiral butterflies to fly between artificial flowers in a wind tunnel, and recorded the way air flowed around their wings using smoke and high-resolution cameras. The work provides fodder for researchers working on insect-sized flying robots.
Continue reading ‘Butterflies offer lessons for robots’ »
20th February 2008, 06:22 am
I’m in two minds about this story - impressed, because nanotechnology is cool and tiny robots are even cooler, but more than a little disturbed at the idea of killer robots flying around and zapping people in the neck. Reuters is reporting that Israel are developing a bionic hornet that could chase, photograph and eventually kill enemy combatants or terrorists. Able to navigate tightly confined areas and so small as to be difficult to target by traditional weaponry, the concept is expected to reach prototype stage within three years.
It’s uncertain as yet whether the robots would be remotely controlled or have some sort of AI, though a combination of both is perhaps most likely; general targeting by remote, while short-range sensors automatically manage obstacle avoidance, tracking and flight.
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23rd January 2008, 02:47 pm
Contact Lenses With Circuits, Lights A Possible Platform For Superhuman Vision
Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes — visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.
The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.
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9th January 2008, 07:43 pm
In the race to make solar cells cheaper and more efficient, many researchers and start-up companies are betting on new designs that exploit nanostructures — materials engineered on the scale of a billionth of a meter. Using nanotechnology, researchers can experiment with and control how a material generates, captures, transports, and stores free electrons — properties that are important for the conversion of sunlight into electricity.Two nanotech methods for engineering solar cell materials have shown particular promise. One uses thin films of metal oxide nanoparticles, such as titanium dioxide, doped with other elements, such as nitrogen. Another strategy employs quantum dots — nanosize crystals — that strongly absorb visible light. These tiny semiconductors inject electrons into a metal oxide film, or “sensitize” it, to increase solar energy conversion. Both doping and quantum dot sensitization extend the visible light absorption of the metal oxide materials.
Combining these two approaches appears to yield better solar cell materials than either one alone does, according to Jin Zhang, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Zhang led a team of researchers from California, Mexico, and China that created a thin film doped with nitrogen and sensitized with quantum dots. When tested, the new nanocomposite material performed better than predicted — as if the functioning of the whole material was greater than the sum of its two individual components.
“We have discovered a new strategy that could be very useful for enhancing the photo response and conversion efficiency of solar cells based on nanomaterials,” said Zhang. “We initially thought that the best we might do is get results as good as the sum of the two, and maybe if we didn’t make this right, we’d get something worse. But surprisingly, these materials were much better.”
The group’s findings were reported in the Journal of Physical Chemistry in a paper posted online on January 4. Lead author of the paper was Tzarara Lopez-Luke, a graduate student visiting in Zheng’s lab who is now at the Instituto de Investigaciones Metalurgicas, UMSNH, Morelia, Mexico.
Continue reading ‘New Nanostructured Thin Film Shows Promise For Efficient Solar Energy Conversion’ »
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