Archive for the ‘Engineering’ Category
They have developed a new and marvelous battery that has for the cathode a special nanostructure, which allow a loading process and download much faster without sacrificing the ability of energy storage.
The new battery thus combines the qualities of a battery with a capacitor.
Most of the capacitors stored very little energy. May release very quickly but can not save much. Most batteries store a reasonably large amount of energy. But they can not release or absorb it quickly. The new battery does both.
The achievement is the work of Paul Braun, Xindi Yu and Huigang Zhang, all three of the University of Illinois. Read the rest of this entry »
Speaking of heavy machinery refers to a complex machine, besides doing their own work, a series of simple machine operations at the same time. The need for heavy machinery is due to the fact that heavy and complicated activities such as the laying of roads, tilling and sowing seeds equidistantly spread over a large area of agricultural fields ready for the start of agricultural activities can not be done with the help of simple machines, nor the work force is capable of performing complex and heavy activities at a relatively fast. The heavy machinery meets the requirement of completing complex jobs at a relatively faster pace and considerable savings in the amount of overhead.
That is why today the machines are an important guideline of construction and delivery time, reducing:
- Labor
- Runtime
It will be months until the situation in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is under a reasonable level of control. Clearly, not only because days earlier Tepco Company, owner of the plant admitted it but also by how much that has been slow to get something as essential as data on the inside of the buildings in the most damaged reactors.
Moreover, in what constitutes a defeat for Japan’s image as a global technology powerhouse in robotics, a robot has been American, not Japanese, the first to achieve inspect those places where no one had entered since the beginning of the disaster. The feat was achieved a PackBot robot model, which has been reviewing the lower floors of buildings of units 1, 2 and 3. Read the rest of this entry »
Developing biological components capable of forming part of electrical circuits can be the first step toward making interfaces that connect nerve cells and human tissues directly to an electronic device such as a robotic limb or an artificial eye.
A team of Indian scientists has devised a way to produce a memristor by human blood.
The memristor is an electronic component, so merely theoretical, was devised in 1971 by electronics engineer Leon Chua of Berkeley. It was succeeded in developing the first in 2008, using titanium dioxide. This scoop was made by a team of scientists from the company Hewlett Packard.
A memristor is a passive device, like a resistor with two terminals but instead of having a fixed value of electrical resistance, its ability to carry the current changes according to the previously applied voltage. In other words, is able to “remember” the previous current. Read the rest of this entry »
When people communicate, the way in which we operate has a lot to do with what we are saying using words that we pronounce them. This aspect has been neglected in many robotic developments aimed at designing androids that interact with humans. New research has dealt with the issue of how robots can use nonverbal communication to interact more naturally with the humans.
A team of researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech), United States, found that when the robots move in a more humane, progressive transitions between postures instead of abrupt changes, people not only better able to recognize what you are doing the robot, but also can interact better with him. Read the rest of this entry »
The future of nuclear power plants is subject to debate each time that there is an accident. And that affects the way in which plants are designed as the selection of the appropriate sites where to locate them. Now, after what has happened in the Fukushima Daiichi plant, has the turn it to power stations built on sites with high seismic danger and tsunami.
Without a doubt, planning for new nuclear plants that decide to build in some countries, as well as other critical energy infrastructure, will be influenced by the Japanese earthquake and the tsunami and its devastating effects on the nuclear reactor core Fukushima Daiichi, as says engineer Michael C. Constantinou, University of Buffalo, and researcher at the Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research, part of the university. Read the rest of this entry »
In a new study has calculated the amount of information that mankind stored, transmitted and calculated through the current technological capabilities of the world total.
We live in a world that increasingly depends on our technological capabilities, as we remember Martin Hilbert of the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, part of the University of Southern California.
In this new study, the following have found things like:
Analyzing both analog devices such as digital memory, the researchers calculate that humanity is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. (This is a number with 20 zeros.)
In other words, if a star was a bit of information, this number would represent a galaxy of information for each person in the world. The figure is 315 times the amount of grains of sand in the world. But not less than one per cent of all information stored in DNA molecules of a human being. Read the rest of this entry »
Airline passengers may someday return to carry their bottles of water, shampoo and other liquid products on the plane through a technology originally developed to verify the quality of the wine.
The Directorate of Science and Technology of the Department of Homeland Security recently awarded a U.S. contract to a defense company headquartered in Denver to develop a magnetic resonance scanner can be located at airports and used to examine bottles and cans in search explosives without having to open them. A prototype of the machine will be built in the laboratory of Matthew Augustine, professor of chemistry at the University of California at Davis who invented the technology.
The technology is similar to the machines to obtain magnetic resonance imaging used in medical scans. Uses a pulse of radio waves and a strong magnetic field to get a signal that shows the chemical structure of the sample. Read the rest of this entry »
Engineering researchers at the University of Michigan imitated the structure of the antennae of the silkworm moth in the construction of a nanopore better, a little instrument in the shape of a tunnel that could expand knowledge about a class of neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s disease.
The nanopores, which are essentially holes drilled in a silicon chip, are tiny measuring instruments that allow the study of individual molecules or proteins. But even the best current nanopores clog easily, so the technology has not been widely adopted in laboratories. It is expected that improved versions bring a major advance toward faster and cheaper sequencing of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).
The UM team, led by Michael Mayer, Associate Professor, Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering, wrote an oily coating that traps the molecules of interest and facilitates their transport through the nanopores. It also allows researchers to adjust the pore size with almost atomic precision.
“This gives us a much better tool for the characterization of biomolecules,” said Mayer. “It gives us a more precise knowledge of their size, charge, shape and concentration and the speed with which they are composed. This could help in the diagnosis and a better understanding of what happens in a class of neurodegenerative diseases including the evils of Parkinson’s, Huntington’s and Alzheimer’s.” Read the rest of this entry »
Go forgetting the plasma, TFT or LED. An article in the journal Nature Photonics has released a full color display based on “nanocrystal quantum dots” that could give way to devices with higher resolution and lower power consumption than today.
Those responsible for the article, led by Choi Byoung Lyong, electrical engineer at Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (Yongin, South Korea), have produced a full color screen of 10 inches, more efficient and brighter than other methods developed by teams of competition. According to Choi, the red pixels achieve a 50% better brightness and 70% better energy efficiency. The display can also bend or curl.
The first devices to benefit from this technology within three years, could be mobile phones, according to Seth Coe-Sullivan , CTO of QD Vision, a U.S. company that produces lighting devices based on this technology. Read the rest of this entry »