Feature Channels: Engineering

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A previously unknown kind of human brain cell appears to help people center themselves in their personal maps of the world, according to a new study from neuroscientists at Columbia Engineering. This discovery shed light on the cellular mechanisms underlying navigation and memory in humans, as well as what parts of the brain might get disrupted during the kinds of memory impairments common in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.

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A new study from computer scientists at Columbia Engineering reveals what may be the first way to encrypt personal images on popular cloud photo services, such as those from Google, Apple, Flickr and others, all without requiring any changes to — or trust in — those services.

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Prosthetics currently lack the sensation of “touch.” To enable a more natural feeling prosthetic hand interface, researchers are the first to incorporate stretchable tactile sensors using liquid metal and machine learning. This hierarchical multi-finger tactile sensation integration could provide a higher level of intelligence for artificial hands by improving control, providing haptic feedback and reconnecting amputees to a previously severed sense of touch.

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Scientists have devised a means of achieving improved information processing with a new technology for effective gate operation. This technology has applications in classical electronics as well as quantum computing, communications and sensing.

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This paper studies the trajectory tracking and balance control problem for an autonomous bicycle — one that is ridden like a normal bicycle before automatically traveling by itself to the next user — that is a non-minimum phase, strongly nonlinear system.

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A new wearable device turns the touch of a finger into a source of power for small electronics and sensors. Engineers at the University of California San Diego developed a thin, flexible strip that can be worn on a fingertip and generate small amounts of electricity when a person’s finger sweats or presses on it. What’s special about this sweat-fueled device is that it generates power even while the wearer is asleep or sitting still.

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Two very different teams of scientists have worked together to reveal important insights into how we sense texture by looking at the whiskers of a rat.

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USC researchers have achieved a better way to identify elusive DNA variants responsible for genetic changes affecting cell functions and diseases.

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Thirteen universities working on a new experiment to be carried out at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility have recently been awarded new grants totaling more than $9 million. The grants come from the National Science Foundation and the Canadian Foundation for Innovation, with a matching award for the CFI grant from Research Manitoba. The grants benefit the Measurement of a Lepton-Lepton Electroweak Reaction Experiment, called MOLLER.

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University of Rhode Island College of Engineering Professor Ali Shafqat Akanda and a team of researchers have developed an application for smartphones called CholeraMap to serve as an early warning device for cholera.

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A research team at the University of Córdoba has developed and evaluated models for the prediction of solar radiation in nine locations in southern Spain and North Carolina (USA).

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A study, published in Nature and is co-authored by Northern Arizona University professors Benjamin Ruddell and Richard Rushforth, looks at the importance of diversity within the supply chain, which helps to reduce damaging disruptions from supply chain shocks.

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Would planes be better if they were more like birds? Engineers from the University of Bristol and the Royal Veterinary College have been studying our feathered-friends to answer this very question, the answer to which will be revealed at the Royal Society Summer Science 2021.

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David Hysell, Professor of Engineering at Cornell University, is using funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop new radar tools and techniques for monitoring space weather, through both upgrades to the world’s largest radar and the creation of a new radar system at Cornell.

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Energy conversion and storage is a critical part of modern society as applications continue to develop at a rapid pace. At the 2021 AIP Publishing Horizons Virtual Conference, researchers will unveil and discuss the latest advances in energy science and how the field will change over the next decades. In addition to speaker sessions, a poster program will provide a wide view of the exciting research going on now by scientists around the world.

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Michele Galizia, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Gallogly College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, has received a 2021 National Science Foundation Early CAREER Development grant to continue his research focusing on membrane technology, a technique that separates molecules from mixtures by size and shape.

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In a step toward increasing the cost-effectiveness of renewable biofuels and bioproducts, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory discovered a microbial enzyme that degrades tough-to-break bonds in lignin, a waste product of biorefineries.

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MIT engineers design the first synthetic circuit that consists entirely of fast, reversible protein-protein interactions.

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Scientists at UC San Francisco have shown that gene-edited cellular therapeutics can be used to successfully treat cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, potentially paving the way for developing less expensive cellular therapies to treat diseases for which there are currently few viable options.

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ORNL story tips: Powered by nature, get on the bus, accelerating methane, helping JET soar, charged up planning and building a better thermostat

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University of Delaware’s Aditya Kunjapur, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and an emerging leader in biosecurity with expertise in teaching cells to create and harness chemical building blocks not found in nature, is the lead author of a new paper published in Science Advances that describes progress on the stability of a biocontainment strategy that uses a microbe’s dependence on a synthetic nutrient to keep it contained.

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As offices nationwide spring back to life, interior space designers and architects will soon have an easy-to-use planning tool to place indoor workplace furniture, staff, partitions and ventilation in a manner that maximizes fresh air flow and reduces the risk of airborne pathogens.

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Researchers know that electricity can help speed up bone healing, but “zapping” fractures has never really caught on, since it requires surgically implanting and removing electrodes powered by an external source. Xudong Wang’s latest invention may make electrostimulation a much more convenient option to speed up bone healing.

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High-performance computer users in the market for a quantum annealing machine or looking for ways to get the most out of one they already have will benefit from a new, open-source software tool for evaluating these emerging platforms at the individual qubit level.

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As smart watches are increasingly able to monitor the vital signs of health, including what's going on when we sleep, a problem has emerged: those wearable, wireless devices are often disconnected from our body overnight, being charged at the bedside.

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Nothing seems more familiar than the sun in the sky. But mysterious swirls, jets, and flashes of powerful light that scientists cannot explain occur in the sun’s outer atmosphere all the time. Now, researchers at PPPL have gained insight into these puzzling phenomena.

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Since its founding, Argonne has employed and partnered with innovators whose contributions have dramatically pushed the frontiers of our understanding and improved the world.

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Artificial intelligence software that scans and pinpoints cracks and other damages in support columns and other structural components may revolutionize how buildings and bridges are inspected.

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Repela Tech LLC, a Detroit-based sustainability tech startup from Wayne State University, was awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase II grant totaling $993,788 for research and development on a patent-pending (WSU Tech ID 20-1601), first-of-a-kind, safe antifouling marine coating.

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FAU has received a $309,527 grant from the National Science Foundation to spearhead the project that will involve experimental work carried out at Technion, and numerical simulations and machine learning tasks conducted at FAU.

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Using wind tunnel measurements and computational fluid dynamics simulations, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineers have demonstrated that aerodynamically integrated vehicle shapes decrease body-axis drag in a crosswind, creating large negative front pressures that effectively “pull” the vehicle forward against the wind, much like a sailboat.

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PNNL’s new Hydrogen Energy Storage Evaluation Tool allows users to examine multiple energy delivery pathways and grid applications to maximize benefits.

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The editors of MIT Technology Review have chosen Argonne’s Jie Xu as an Innovator Under 35 for 2021. She is one of only 35 innovators under the age of 35 named to this list. She is being recognized for her research on printable skin-like electronics.

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DHS S&T transitioned the Resilient Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Conformance Framework to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers to further refine into international industry standards.

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University of Colorado Boulder researchers have discovered that minuscule, self-propelled particles called "nanoswimmers" can escape from mazes as much as 20 times faster than other, passive particles, paving the way for their use in everything from industrial clean-ups to medication delivery.

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Inspired by the way plants absorb and distribute water and nutrients, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have developed a groundbreaking method for transporting liquids and gases using 3D-printed lattice design and capillary action phenomena.

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Just as modeling is a close estimate of real-world processes, so too are verbal explanations of such nuanced arithmetic. Trisha Sain from Michigan Tech explores multiscale physics by thinking about the Lego bricks in her living room, the windows of skyscrapers and cooking a feast.

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In a study that compares rapid antigen and laboratory PCR approaches for COVID-19 serial screening, researchers affiliated with the NIH RADx initiative reported results from 43 people infected with the virus.

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According to the World Health Organization, about 785 million people around the world lack a clean source of drinking water.

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Scientists at the University of Sydney and Japan's National Institute for Material Science (NIMS) have discovered that an artificial network of nanowires can be tuned to respond in a brain-like way when electrically stimulated.

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Paras Prasad, executive director of the Institute for Lasers, Photonics and Biophotonics at the University at Buffalo, is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Photonics Society William Streifer Scientific Achievement Award.

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A new, two-dimensional material from the lab of Rohan Mishra is the first such material to be synthesized and purposefully used.

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Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have developed a nanoparticle composite that grows into 3D crystals. The new 3D-grown material could speed up production and eliminate errors in the mass manufacturing of nanoscale photonics for smart buildings or actuators for robotics.

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New Columbia Engineering study unveils a computer vision technique for giving machines a more intuitive sense for what will happen next by leveraging higher-level associations between people, animals, and objects.“Our algorithm is a step toward machines being able to make better predictions about human behavior, and thus better coordinate their actions with ours,” said Computer Science Professor Carl Vondrick. “Our results open a number of possibilities for human-robot collaboration, autonomous vehicles, and assistive technology.”

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Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Engineering and the Faculty of Arts have jointly developed the “Thai Speech Emotion Recognition Data Sets and Models”, now available for free downloads, to help enhance sales operations and service systems to better respond to customers’ needs.