• New underwater robots mimic designs found in nature

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    In recent years, robotic underwater vehicles have become more common in a variety of industrial and civil sectors. Now, a new class of underwater robot has emerged that mimics designs found in nature. These “biomimetic” vehicles promise to lead to new underwater technologies that could help the oil and gas industry, underwater humanitarian demining, environmental monitoring, search and rescue operations, anti-terrorist activities, harbor surveillance, coastal security and fisheries management, and more.

  • Young engineers compete in underwater robotics race

    Student-built autonomous underwater vehicles will speed through the depths of a Navy pool in a battle for supremacy at the 16th International RoboSub Competition. The competition is being held this week (22-28 July). In addition to building autonomous underwater vehicles, teams are also responsible for creating Web sites and writing journal papers that outline their work.

  • Ben-Gurion University student team’s Hydro Camel competes in RoboSub Competition

    Today, there are many remotely operated submarines that handle important tasks, such as checking underwater pipelines, mapping underwater minefields, searching for locations to place communication cables, and searching for sunken vessels. These marine vessels, however, are limited by effective communication cables and require frequent human-operator contact. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is developing a more accurate and effective autonomous, independently thinking underwater vessel that would revolutionize these and other tasks. The BGU entry in the RoboSub Competition is called Hydro Camel.

  • U.K. water industry: fracking may contaminate U.K. drinking water

    U.K. water companies have warned the shale gas industry that the quality of U.K. drinking water must be protected at all costs and fracking must not harm public health. Shale gas fracking could lead to contamination of the water supply with methane gas and harmful chemicals if not carefully planned and carried out.

  • Predicting what could happen if Hurricane hits

    A Sandia National Laboratories team is gearing up for hurricane season, readying analyses to help people in the eye of a storm. The team has two jobs: conducting annual “hurricane swath” analyses of probable impacts on the Gulf Coast and East Coast, and providing quick analyses of crisis response in the face of an imminent hurricane threat to the United States. A swath analysis looks at how a hurricane might interrupt critical services and at impacts to infrastructure specific to an area, such as petroleum and petrochemical industries in Houston or financial services in New York City. It also looks at such things as the economic impact of the storm or how it could upset food deliveries.

  • Hollow-core optical fiber to enable high-power military sensors

    The intensity of light that propagates through glass optical fiber is fundamentally limited by the glass itself. A novel fiber design using a hollow, air-filled core removes this limitation and significantly improves performance by forcing light to travel through channels of air, instead of the glass around it. DARPA’s spider-web-like, hollow-core fiber design is the first to demonstrate single-spatial-mode, low-loss and polarization control — key properties needed for advanced military applications such as high-precision fiber optic gyroscopes for inertial navigation.

  • Georgia Tech’s VentureLab ranks No. 2 among university-based incubators

    Georgia Tech’s VentureLab helps create startup companies based on Georgia Tech research. Since its formation in 2001, VentureLab has launched more than 150 technology companies which have attracted more than $700 million in outside funding. VentureLab program has been ranked second in the world in a new benchmarking study. The study, conducted by UBI Index, examined 150 university-based business incubators in twenty-two different countries.

  • U.S. research universities subject to sustained cyberattack campaign by China

    Leading U.S. research universities report that they have been subject to millions of Chinese hacking attempts weekly. The Chinese are aware that universities, and the professors who do research under the schools’ auspices, receive thousands of patents each year in areas such as prescription drugs, computer chips, fuel cells, aircraft, medical devices, food production, and more. The Chinese government-sponsored cyberattacks on American research universities are an expansion of efforts by China to steal information that has commercial, political, or national security value.

  • CIA copied, employed “Q”-developed 007 outlandish gadgets

    The real-life CIA copied and employed a few outlandish gadgets from James Bond movies. The CIA was successful copying Rosa Klebb’s infamous spring-loaded poison knife shoe from the film From Russia with Love, but was less successful trying to copy the homing beacon device used in Goldfinger to track the villain’s car. The CIA version had “too many bugs in it,” former CIA director Allen Dulles would later say, and stopped working when the enemy entered a crowded city.

  • Dealing with man-made earthquakes

    Between 1967 and 2000, central and eastern United States experienced on average 20 earthquakes above a magnitude 3.0 a year. Between 2010 and 2012, the number of earthquakes above a magnitude 3.0 in these regions has dramatically increased to an average of 100 a year. This increase in earthquakes prompts two important questions: Are they natural, or man-made? And what should be done in the future as we address the causes and consequences of these events to reduce associated risks?

  • STEM education and U.S. national security

    Los Alamos National Laboratory director Charlie McMillan will be one of seventeen speakers at this year’s TEDxABQ. TEDxABQ is an independently organized event in Albuquerque, New Mexico, affiliated with the popular TED Talks series.McMillan will discuss the linkage between early education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (known as STEM) and national security.

  • Crawling robot examines, evaluates condition of load-bearing cables

    Severe weather events inflict damage and destruction. The condition of infrastructure and its components may contribute to the overall damage: weak components and damaged elements make infrastructure less likely to withstand the stress of a storm. Researchers have developed a crawling robot capable of examining and evaluating the condition of load-bearing cables, such as those found in bridges, elevators, and cable cars.

  • Mother Nature offers best protection for coastal communities’ infrastructure

    Extreme weather, sea-level rise, and degraded coastal ecosystems are placing people and property at greater risk of damage from coastal hazards. The likelihood and magnitude of losses can be reduced by intact ecosystems near vulnerable coastal communities. Scientists say that natural habitats such as dunes and reefs are critical to protecting millions of U.S. residents and billions of dollars in property from coastal storms.

  • Better teaching for inquiring minds

    Inquiry-based learning is an educational method centered on the investigation of questions, scenarios, or problems. It is seen by many as a positive alternative to traditional forms of instruction where students are required to simply memorize information.

  • Concrete recycling robot disassembles concrete structures for recycling, reuse

    Current concrete-demolition techniques require a lot of power crushing, separation, and machinery, not to mention the fact that they waste a lot of water in order to prevent dust blooms during operation. A new concrete recycling robot is designed efficiently to disassemble concrete structures without any waste, dust, or separation and enable reclaimed building materials to be reused for new prefabricated concrete buildings. It does so by using a water jet to crack the concrete surface, separate the waste, and package the cleaned, dust-free material.