Emergency management teams, faced with an approaching hurricane, can access GIS map data through voice and gestures for real-time decision making on issues ranging from protecting hazardous materials sites to evacuating assisted-living facilities by using a computer system developed by Penn State researchers.

The research team says the system also can assist planners and transportation engineers visualize the impacts of potential developments and highways as well as help crisis management pe

Seeing is believing, unless you’re blind or visually impaired. To this group, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) says, “feeling is believing.”
Computer scientists and engineers at NIST have created a tactile graphic display that brings electronic images to the blind and visually impaired in the same way that Braille makes words readable.

The new imaging device was developed at NIST by the same research team that recently created an electronic Braille reader.

Like rapidly flowing gases and liquids, magnetically confined plasmas in tokamaks and related fusion devices exhibit a high degree of turbulence, which can generally destroy the optimal conditions for producing fusion energy. In a deeply encouraging new result, scientists have experimentally confirmed that turbulence can actually limit its own ability to wreak havoc.

Researchers at the DIII-D tokamak at General Atomics have discovered that turbulence generates its own flows that act as a sel

Doughnuts of plasma can be coaxed into configurations with hollow current rings, providing practical advantages over conventional “filled doughnut” shapes. Simulations suggest they will allow faster turn-on and greater efficiency of future nuclear fusion power plants.

Toroidal tokamaks, doughnut-shaped experimental fusion reactors, use a complex system of magnetic fields to hold a plasma together. Electrical currents flowing in the plasma itself are essential for making the internal magneti

In work that promises new insights into the cosmos and fusion-energy production alike, physicists have reported they have made the first three-dimensional laboratory measurements of magnetic reconnection, the main process by which magnetic fields release energy in the universe.

Magnetic reconnection is the phenomenon in which magnetic energy in a plasma is rapidly converted to heat and jets of energetic particles. This process is thought to heat the solar corona, the outer atmosphere of the

Working toward the vision of generating clean energy from nuclear fusion, researchers have successfully imploded fuel capsules by bombarding them with intense x-rays. The results show that the process generates significant fusion and that the implosion method looks capable of generating large-scale energy production.

The process works by bombarding two millimeter (about 1/16th inch) fuel capsules with intense x-rays from Sandia National Laboratories Z-pinch machine. The x-rays, impacting fro

Duke University researchers have created an ultracold gas that has the startling property of bursting outward in a preferred direction when released. According to the researchers, studying the properties of the “lopsided” gas will yield fundamental insights into how matter holds itself together at the subatomic level.

Also, the research team leader said their data suggests the possibility that the gas is exhibiting a never-before-seen kind of superfluidity – a property in which matter at ex

A fraction of a second after the Big Bang, all the primordial soup of matter in the Universe was `broken` into its most fundamental constituents. It was thought to have disappeared forever. However scientists strongly suspect that the exotic soup of dissolved matter can still be found in today`s Universe, in the core of certain very dense objects called neutron stars.

With ESA`s space telescope XMM-Newton, they are now closer to testing this idea. For the first time, XMM-Newton has been able

Scientists and engineers build the transistors that run televisions, radios and similar electronic devices based on the moving electric charges of electrons. But the electron also has another key property: a magnetic “spin” that scientists believe could be exploited to develop faster, smaller and more efficient devices.

The first step is to determine the magnetic properties of materials that could be used to create futuristic nanoscale devices, a task that has escaped scientists until now.

Researchers from the University of Michigan and RIKEN, a research institute in Japan, say the biological motors that nature uses for intracellular transport and other biological functions inspired them to create a whole new class of micro-devices for controlling magnetic flux quanta in superconductors that could lead to the development of a new generation of medical diagnostic tools.

As integrated circuits become smaller and smaller, it becomes increasingly difficult to create the many “gu

The research team of the Public University of Navarre (Basque Country), under the supervision of professor Ramon Gonzalo Garcia of the department of Electric and Electronic Engineering, is participating in a project of the European Space Agency. The final objective is the design of a camera that, working in the range of millimetric frequencies, will be able to obtain images send by different bodies, for example, stars.

The project named “Photonic antenna front-ends: Photonic crystals: Mater

Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter. That’s what five-dozen Jefferson Lab researchers were counting on for an experiment in Hall A

Albert Einstein figured it out by 1905, as he was formulating his special theory of relativity: while you can’t exactly get something from nothing, you can come close. His famous formula, E=MC 2 , works both ways. Just as matter can be converted into energy, so too can energy become matter.

That’s

Astronomers have been puzzled for decades as to how the rings of hot gas surrounding certain types of star are formed. Now a team of scientists from the Universities of Glasgow and Wisconsin believe they have found the answer. The team studied a type of young, hot star, known as a “Be star”, that has a disk of glowing gas around it, similar to the rings surrounding Saturn. Until now, no one has been able to account for how these rings form but in a paper published this month*, the team suggest an ans

Using a technique based on the work of the 1902 Nobel Prizewinner, Pieter Zeeman, an international team of astronomers have, for the first time, provided conclusive proof that the magnetic field close to a number of aging stars is 10 to 100 times stronger than that of our own Sun. These observations suggest a solution to the long outstanding problem as to how, at the end of their lives, a perfectly spherical star can give rise to the complex and often far from spherical structure seen in the resultin

An innovative new software can detect and correct a database impaired by an attack while the database system continues to process transactions, says a Penn State researcher.

“We simulated attackers’ behaviors on a database and then monitored the response of the database,” said Dr. Peng Liu, assistant professor of information sciences and technology. “We can’t prevent attackers from getting in, but with this technology, the database can heal itself on-the-fly.”

Liu perfor

VLT UVES Observes Most Metal-Deficient Star Known [1]
A faint star in the southern Milky Way, designated HE 0107-5240, has been found to consist virtually only of hydrogen and helium. It has the lowest abundance of heavier elements ever observed, only 1/200,000 of that of the Sun – 20 times less than the previous record-holding star.

This is the result of a major ongoing research project by an international team of astronomers [2] . It is based on a decade-lon