At sea, when you approach land? Tellmaris’ prototype system provides up-to-date 3D information to orient sailors as and when they dock.

Two years after initial market research and interviews with over 800 pleasure boat users, the IST-funded TellMaris team (consisting of firms and research institutes from Norway, Finland, Germany and Greece) has developed three prototypes for areas of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. Sailors and leisure boat tourists were chosen as the test sam

Open telematic platforms offer the possibility of integrating Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) components by allowing service providers and equipment manufacturers to test, upgrade or demonstrate their products, services, equipment and standards free of charge. SMITH provides such a platform helping to guarantee that adopted solutions comply with existing and emerging European standards.

Testbed contributes to ITS standards

The quality manager of the IST programme funded

A Cornell University researcher is developing techniques for making photonic microchips — in which streams of electrons are replaced by beams of light — including ways to guide and bend light in air or a vacuum, to switch a beam of light on and off and to connect nanophotonic chips to optical fiber.

Michal Lipson, an assistant professor at Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y., described recent research by the Nanophotonics Group in Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the a

A three-dimensional microfabrication technique that uses a unique class of light-activated molecules to selectively initiate chemical reactions within polymers and other materials could provide an efficient way to produce complex structures with sub-micron features.

Known as “two-photon 3D lithography,” the technique could compete with existing processes for fabricating microfluidic devices, photonic bandgap structures, optical storage devices, photonic switches and couplers, sensors, actuat

For years, organic electro-optic polymers have held the promise of vastly improving technologies such as communications, data processing and image displays. Now it appears scientists are on the verge of breakthroughs that will bring dramatic progress in materials, as well as the devices in which they are used, setting the stage for a virtual revolution.

Simply put, electro-optic polymers are being used to make devices that take information that typically has been transmitted electronically

A new collaboration at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will contend with lots of sticking points–by design. NIST and industry researchers intend to devise rapid screening and measurement methods that speed discovery of new epoxies, pressure-sensitive adhesives and other products manufactured for the $30 billion global adhesives market.

In a project just getting under way, the partners will refine and extend miniaturized technologies for simultaneous testing of hun

The first reactor capable of producing hydrogen from a renewable fuel source–ethanol–efficiently enough to hold economic potential has been invented by University of Minnesota engineers. When coupled with a hydrogen fuel cell, the unit–small enough to hold in your hand–could generate one kilowatt of power, almost enough to supply an average home, the researchers said. The technology is poised to remove the major stumbling block to the “hydrogen economy”: no free hydrogen exists, except what is ma

Researchers have created a portable, chip-size version of a detection system that is commonly used by industry and law enforcement to identify everything from agricultural toxins to DNA.

The miniature detector could move certain types of testing from the lab into the field, saving time and money while increasing security.

The team, which used a newly developed laser-processing technique to create the miniature detector, was supported by the National Science Foundation and led by a P

Heat may be essential for life, but in some cases – such as protecting the space shuttle or improving the efficiency of a jet engine – materials with low thermal conductivities are needed to prevent passage of too much heat. As reported in the Feb. 13 issue of the journal Science, researchers have created a better thermal insulator by controlling material structure at the nanoscale.

“We explored ways to control thermal properties in materials by introducing structure on nanometer length scal

A proposed U.S. mission to investigate three ice-covered moons of Jupiter will demand fast-paced research, fabrication and realistic non-nuclear testing of a prototype nuclear reactor within two years, says a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist.

The roots of this build and test effort have been under way at Los Alamos since the mid-1990s, said David Poston, leader of the Space Fission Power Team in Los Alamos’ Nuclear Design and Risk Analysis Group.

NASA proposes using u

In Treibstoffen enthaltene Schwefel- und Stickstoff-Verbindungen setzen bei der Verbrennung Schwefel- und Stickoxide frei, die die Umwelt belasten. Daher wird immer größerer Wert darauf gelegt, dass Benzin, Diesel und Kerosin möglichst frei von diesen Stoffen sind.

Forscher der University of Michigan haben eine neue Methode entwickelt, um unliebsame Stickstoffverbindungen aus Diesel zu entfernen. Ralph T. Yang und Arturo J. Hernández-Maldonado suchten nach einer adsorptiven Methode, um stör

At 2.5 tons and 9 feet high, the truck that Ohio State University engineers are about to race across the Mojave Desert could literally crush the competition.

And it would do so without a driver.

Of course, the truck won’t be squashing its rivals — the purpose of the competition is to design vehicles that can drive autonomously and avoid obstacles, rather than run them over.

With no human intervention and only global positioning system and local sensing data to guid

Researchers at Purdue University have developed a miniature device sensitive enough to detect a single virus particle, an advancement that could have many applications, including environmental-health monitoring and homeland security.

The device is a tiny “cantilever,” a diving board-like beam of silicon that naturally vibrates at a specific frequency. When a virus particle weighing about one-trillionth as much as a grain of rice lands on the cantilever, it vibrates at a different frequency,

Cutting high-thickness metal sheets is a basic manufacturing process common to a wide range of industrial sectors, from heavy carpentry to ship-building. Laser-cutting technology ought, in theory, to have significant advantages over traditional cutting processes, among them high cutting speed, no tool wear and a reduction in the transfer of energy to the piece of metal being cut. Yet despite the fact that commercial laser-cutting systems have been on the market for a decade, their use has not become

Dutch researcher Michiel Blauw has described the physical limitations of the plasma-etching of deep, narrow microstructures in silicon. His results have led to such an improvement in the etching process that trenches with a depth more than 30 times their width can now be made. This is important for the production of sensitive sensors.

Blauw investigated fluorine-based plasma etching processes. A plasma with a high ion-density ’burns’ a small hole in silicon. Many applications requi

An MIT device that makes the world’s most precise rulers—with “ticks” only a few hundred billionths of a meter apart—could impact fields from the manufacture of computer chips to space physics.

The Nanoruler is 10 to 1,000 times faster and more precise than other methods for patterning parallel lines and spaces (known collectively as gratings) across large surfaces more than 12 inches in diameter. Such large surfaces are key to a number of applications involving gratings, such as larger waf