• On-Demand Drinking Water from Air

    Providing potable drinking water to deployed troops operating in low resource or contested environments is no simple undertaking. Logistics teams face great risk delivering water and often incur what would otherwise be preventable casualties. Low-power extraction technologies could capture potable water from ambient arid air, giving deployed troops greater mission flexibility.

  • DARPA Wants Smart Suits to Protect Against Biological Attacks

    DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, wants to accelerate the development of innovative textiles and smart materials to better and more comfortably protect humans from chemical and biological threats.

  • Developing Digital Twin for Electricity Grid to Ease Transition to Renewables

    The rapid transition to renewable energy threatens to cause major problems to the very expensive electricity grid in the Netherlands. Researchers are now working on a “digital twin” to make it possible to study the grid effectively.

  • Telefonica Deutschland Chooses Huawei to Build Its German 5G Network

    Rebuffing U.S. pressure, German mobile provider Telefonica Deutschland announced Wednesday that it has chosen Finland’s Nokia and China’s Huawei to build its 5G network in Germany, the company. Huawei is a global leader in constructing equipment and infrastructure for ultra-high-speed 5G data networks, but the intelligence services of leading Western countries have argue that Huawei is a security threat because of its close ties with the Chinese military and intelligence establishments. 

  • Intelligent Camera Detects Roadside Bombs Automatically

    Roadside bombs are sneaky and effective killers. They are easy to manufacture and hide, making it the weapon of choice for insurgents and terrorists across the world. Finding and disabling these lethal devices is difficult. Dutch engineers have developed a real-time early-warning system. When mounted on a military vehicle, it can automatically detect the presence of those bombs by registering suspicious changes in the environment.

  • Protecting Bridge During Catastrophic Earthquakes

    More than one million people have died in the 1,800 magnitude 5+ earthquakes recorded worldwide since 2000. Bridges are the most vulnerable parts of a transport network when earthquakes occur, obstructing emergency response, search and rescue missions and aid delivery, increasing potential fatalities.

  • Formula 1 Technology Helps in the Construction of Skyscrapers

    Researchers are drawing on Formula 1 technology for the construction of “needle-like” skyscrapers. The researchers are developing new vibration-control devices based on Formula 1 technology so “needle-like” high-rise skyscrapers which still withstand high winds can be built.

  • Paper-Based Sensor Detects Potent Nerve Toxins

    Chemist developed a new, paper-based sensor that can detect two potent nerve toxins that have reportedly been used in chemical warfare. The toxin, paraoxon, is thought to have been used in chemical warfare during the 1970s in what is now Zimbabwe, and later by the apartheid regime in South Africa as part of its chemical weapons program.

  • Low Frequency Sound May Predict Tornado Formation

    How can you tell when a storm is going to produce a tornado even before the twister forms? Research indicates that prior to tornado formation, storms emit low-frequency sounds.

  • A Quantum Computing Future Is Unlikely, Due to Random Hardware Errors

    Earlier this fall Google announced that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, that it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly criticized the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity. “So how can you make sense of what is going on?” Subhash Kak, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, asks. “As someone who has worked on quantum computing for many years, I believe that due to the inevitability of random errors in the hardware, useful quantum computers are unlikely to ever be built.”

  • Arctic “Ice Management” Delays, but Not Negate, Climate Change Effects

    According to a much-debated geoengineering approach, both sea-ice retreat and global warming could be slowed by using millions of wind-powered pumps, drifting in the sea ice, to promote ice formation during the Arctic winter. Researchers say that the approach could potentially put off ice-free Arctic summers for a few more decades, but beyond that, the Arctic the massive campaign wouldn’t produce any meaningful cooling effect.

  • Underwater Telecom Cables to Be Used as Seismic Detection Network

    About 70 percent of Earth’s surface lies under the sea, which means that, until now, most of the Earth’s surface had been largely without early-warning seismic detection stations. Scientists say that fiber-optic cables that constitute a global undersea telecommunications network could one day help in studying offshore earthquakes.

  • Technologies to Manage Climate Change Already Exist – but U.K. Needs to Scale Up Efforts Urgently

    In the U.K., climate change is being tackled by taking baby steps. Andreas Busch writes that this is unfortunate, because “The world already has effective engineering solutions to manage climate change and to limit global temperatures from rising above 1.5°C – a target set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But there is a desperate lack of conviction from politicians and society to address the climate emergency.”

  • Safeguarding Drones, Robotic Cars against Cyberattacks

    Robotic vehicles like Amazon delivery drones or Mars rovers can be hacked more easily than people may think, new research finds. Researchers designed three types of stealth attack on robotic vehicles that caused the machines to crash, miss their targets or complete their missions much later than scheduled.

  • Adding Hard-to-Reach Water to the Water Supply

    More than 20 percent of the world’s population are dependent on karst groundwater. In these regions, large amounts of water seep into the porous rock and are available at great depths only. Moreover, karst water is susceptible to pollution. Use for sustainable water supply is a challenge in threshold and developing countries.