As an analogy Weitzner says imagine trying to shape environmental policy without any way of measuring carbon levels in the atmosphere
says Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi, a postdoc in MIT Aerospace Controls Lab. ormally, a robot may make some decision,
a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, will present details of the visualization system at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronauticsscitech conference in January.
and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world.
or propulsion systems for fist-sized nanosatellites. In the latest issue of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical systems Velsquez-Garc a his graduate students Eric Heubel and Philip Ponce de Leon and Frances Hill a postdoc in his group describe a new prototype
Higher currents thus promise more-efficient manufacturing and more-nimble satellites. The same prototype also crams 1900 emitters onto a chip that s only a centimeter square quadrupling the array size and emitter density of even the best of its predecessors.
and not a beam of droplets says Herbert Shea an associate professor in the Microsystems for Space technologies Laboratory at the cole Polytechnique F d rale de Lausanne.
Shea believes that at least in the near term the technology s most promising application is in spacecraft propulsion.
whereas it would take very little effort to use it as propulsion for small spacecraft he says.
The reason you d like to be in ion mode is to have the most efficient conversion of the mass of the propellant into the momentum of the spacecraft t
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth s surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight s energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don t need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun s spectrum.
#Shrink-wrapping spacesuits For future astronauts the process of suiting up may go something like this:
Instead of climbing into a conventional bulky gas-pressurized suit an astronaut may don a lightweight stretchy garment lined with tiny musclelike coils.
She would then plug in to a spacecraft s power supply triggering the coils to contract and essentially shrinkwrap the garment around her body.
not only support the astronaut but would give her much more freedom to move during planetary exploration.
Now MIT researchers are one step closer to engineering such an active second-skin spacesuit: Dava Newman a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT and her colleagues have engineered active compression garments that incorporate small springlike coils that contract in response to heat.
The coils are made from a shape-memory alloy (SMA) a type of material that remembers an engineered shape
In subsequent tests the group found that the pressure produced by the coils equaled that required to fully support an astronaut in space.
With conventional spacesuits you re essentially in a balloon of gas that s providing you with the necessary one-third of an atmosphere of pressure to keep you alive in the vacuum of space says Newman who has worked for the past decade to design a formfitting flexible spacesuit of the future.
While skintight spacesuits have been proposed in the past there s been one persistent design hurdle: how to squeeze in and out of a pressurized suit that s engineered to be extremely tight.
The first option would overheat an astronaut and require heavy battery packs a design that would significantly impede mobility
and is given likely infeasible the limited power resources available to astronauts in space. Holschuh and Newman are currently exploring the second option looking into potential mechanisms to lock
As for where the coils may be threaded within a spacesuit Holschuh is contemplating several designs. For instance an array of coils may be incorporated into the center of a suit with each coil attached to a thread that radiates to the suit s extremities.
Or smaller arrays of coils could be placed in strategic locations within a spacesuit to produce localized tension
We re trying to keep our astronauts alive safe and mobile but these designs are not just for use in space.
This research was funded by NASA and the MIT Portugal Program m
#How to hide like an octopus Cephalopods, which include octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish, are among nature most skillful camouflage artists,
That force they reasoned should be enough for the robot to push up against the downward force of gravity
I need to apply to compensate for the gravitational force Kim says. Now we re able to control bounding at many speeds.
But their advisor, Jonathan How, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics who directs of the Aerospace Controls Laboratory,
the material can even direct water upward against gravity. Each microhair made of nickel is about 70 microns high and 25 microns wide about one-fourth the diameter of a human hair.
but also light much as window blinds tilt to filter the sun. Researchers say the work could lead to waterproofing and anti-glare applications such as smart windows for buildings and cars.
or sunlight says Yangying Zhu a graduate student in MIT s Department of Mechanical engineering. So you could filter how much solar radiation you want coming in and also shed raindrops.
They rely on gravity or other forces to move fluids or particles. Varanasi s team decided to use external fields such as magnetic fields to make surfaces active exerting precise control over the behavior of particles
In a recent case study with Mars for example Affectiva found that the client s chocolate ads elicited the highest emotional engagement
#Steam from the sun A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun. The structure a layer of graphite flakes
When sunlight hits the structure surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material pores,
if scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.
who led the development of the structure. specially in remote areas where the sun is the only source of energy,
Cutting the optical concentration Today, solar-powered steam generation involves vast fields of mirrors or lenses that concentrate incoming sunlight, heating large volumes of liquid to high enough
when exposed to sunlight, vaporizing the surrounding water molecules as steam. But initiating this reaction requires very intense solar energy about 1, 000 times that of an average sunny day.
is that steam-generating applications can function with lower sunlight concentration and less-expensive tracking systems. his is a huge advantage in cost-reduction,
From sun to steam The approach itself is relatively simple: Since steam is generated at the surface of a liquid,
Ghasemi looked for a material that could both efficiently absorb sunlight and generate steam at a liquid surface.
As sunlight hits the structure, it creates a hotspot in the graphite layer, generating a pressure gradient that draws water up through the carbon foam.
and exposing it to a solar simulator a light source that simulates various intensities of solar radiation.
Water will condense out from the atmosphere it happens naturally he says. The atmosphere is a huge source of power
and all you need is a temperature difference between the air and the device he adds allowing the device to produce condensation
Lasers can also move energy between two points such as two satellites. But this requires an uninterrupted continuous path between the transmitter and the receiver
and water that s extracted is put in large tanks to allow separation by gravity; the oil gradually floats to the top where it can be skimmed off.
but the exact reason why the compound is so effective at blocking such a broad spectrum of sunlight has remained something of a mystery.
Prototype to productglass first conceived of the BAT while working at MIT toward his master s degree in aeronautics and astronautics.
#Getting more electricity out of solar cells When sunlight shines on today solar cells, much of the incoming energy is given off as waste heat rather than electrical current.
In most photovoltaic (PV) materials, a photon (a packet of sunlight) delivers energy that excites a molecule,
which makes up almost half the sun electromagnetic radiation at the Earth surface. According to their estimates, applying their technology as an inexpensive coating on silicon solar cells could increase efficiency by as much as 25 percent.
and pilot their technology in outdoor solar systems. Unified Solar now becomes the finalist in the energy category in the MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition,
Sun exposure to solar panels produces about 0. 5 percent of wasted heat per Degree celsius increase.
for the agricultural industry. arth as a spaceshipecovolt is valuable today as a solution to Earth water issues.
But the core technology began as a bit of aerospace ingenuity and has since found its way back to space.
and Buck, a biological engineering graduate student, won a grant from the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts program to create a life-support system that could treat waste
and generate electricity for astronauts. Soon, they came across exoelectrogens; a 1999 study had revealed that exoelectrogens could,
In 2012, NASA began funding a Cambrian project, called Exogen, that uses electromethanogenesis to more efficiently extract oxygen or fuel from CO2 for long-duration space flights.
NASA currently carries out oxygen recovery from CO2 in a multistep chemical process; Exogen will make it a simplified, one-step process.
Surprisingly, shifting from aerospace to Earth applications, and back again, has been an easy transition, Silver says. he challenge of supporting astronauts in space is very similar to sustainability On earth,
he says. hat youe looking to do in space is maximize reuse, while minimizing energetics. If we look at Earth as the spaceship, it the same problem.
With Ecovolt, and its other ongoing projects, Cambrian overall aim, Silver says, is to leverage biotechnology to advance a sustainable ndustrial ecology,
David Lidzey a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield who was involved not in this work calls the research a really impressive demonstration of a direct measurement of the diffusion of triplet excitons and their eventual trapping.
The problem with solar power is that sometimes the sun doesn shine. Now a team at MIT and Harvard university has come up with an ingenious workaround a material that can absorb the sun heat
and store that energy in chemical form, ready to be released again on demand. This solution is no solar-energy panacea:
since it makes the sun energy, in the form of heat, storable and distributable, says Jeffrey Grossman, an associate professor of materials science and engineering,
Exposing them to sunlight causes them to absorb energy and jump from one configuration to the other,
taking in energy from the sun, storing it indefinitely, and then releasing it on demand.
while the sun isn out, being able to store heat for later use could be a big benefit.
and can withstand extreme temperatures, sun exposure, and heavy wear, says Doyle, the senior author of a paper describing the particles in the April 13 issue of Nature Materials.
known as are earth upconverting nanocrystals. These crystals are doped with elements such as ytterbium, gadolinium, erbium, and thulium,
This new approach could ultimately lead to advances in solar photovoltaics, detectors for telescopes and microscopes,
The findings could also prove useful in optical systems, such as microscopes and telescopes, for viewing faint objects that are close to brighter objects for example, a faint planet next to a bright star.
By using a system that receives light only from a certain angle, such devices could have improved an ability to detect faint targets.
Plants typically make use of only about 10 percent of the sunlight available to them,
Howard A. Stone a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton university who was involved not in this research calls this a very interesting paper
and it works much more reliably than lidar in bright sunlight when ambient light can yield misleading readings.
#Inexpensive nano-camera can operate at the speed of light A $500 ano-camerathat can operate at the speed of light has been developed by researchers in the MIT Media Lab. The three-dimensional camera,
Since the speed of light is known, it is then simple for the camera to calculate the distance the signal has travelled
These loops form a new layer surrounding the nanotube, known as a corona. The MIT researchers found that the loops within the corona are arranged very precisely along the tube,
and the spacing between the anchors determines which target molecule will be able to wedge into the loops
They are now working on a way to predict such polymer-nanotube interactions based on the structure of the corona layers,
using data generated from a new type of microscope that Landry built to image the interactions between the carbon nanotube coronas
and their targets. hat happening to the polymer and the corona phase has been a bit of a mystery,
Howard Stone, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton university who was involved not in this work,
a professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic institute who was involved not in this research,
Don Boroson on NASA s record-breaking use of laser communications Last week NASA announced that the Lunar Laser communication Demonstration (LLCD) on its Lunar Atmosphere
and Dust environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft had made history by using a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 239000 miles from the moon to Earth at a record-breaking data-download speed of 622 megabits per second (Mbps). This download speed is more than six times faster than the speed achieved by the best
radio system ever flown to the moon. LLCD also demonstrated a data-upload speed of 20 Mbps on a laser beam transmitted from a ground station in New mexico to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit;
this speed is 5000 times faster than the upload speed of the best radio system sent to the moon.
Finally LLCD provided continuous measurements of the distance from Earth to the fast-moving LADEE spacecraft with an unprecedented accuracy of less than half an inch.
These tests were the first in a monthlong demonstration of the capabilities of the LLCD
He describes below the highly improved communications capabilities that will enable NASA to significantly change the scope and design of future scientific space missions.
It is NASA s first space-based laser communications system. And it is by far the longest two-way laser communications link ever accomplished.
It includes signaling approaches that allow it to give errorfree performance through our turbulent atmosphere.
which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets. And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.
Q: Why is this work important? A: It is agreed generally that present-day science and exploration missions to deep space are constrained by the amount of data they can get back to Earth.
Mars landers and orbiters gather much more information in the form of images for example than they can send back over the huge distance Mars is as much as 1000 times farther from Earth than the moon despite the incredible development of NASA s radio-based
Deep space Network over the past 50 years. It has been known for years that laser communications have the potential to deliver much higher data rates and use smaller space terminals than radio-based systems.
With the success of LLCD next-generation space mission designers can now feel more comfortable in including a laser communication system as part of their design.
and power on their spacecraft for the much higher data return they can get. Q:
and concepts that Lincoln Laboratory has been developing for NASA for the past 10 years and those grew out of our laser communications developments from the previous 20 years.
When Lincoln Lab pointed out to the NASA sponsors that the pieces could add up to this demonstration NASA made the mission happen.
and delivered these various parts to the spacecraft and to the ground site. Finally we designed
the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT. hat pretty much a description of what the ankle is.
and astronomy whose lab led the research. The magnetic graphene acquires new electronic properties so that new quantum phenomena can arise.
First the cell absorbs sunlight which excites electrons in the active layer of the cell.
The collaborating group from Rensselaer Polytechnic institute is led by Diana Borca-Tasciuc, associate professor of mechanical, aerospace and nuclear engineering.
This shows that we can use 3-D printing to create complex electronics including semiconductors said Mcalpine an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
and biological materials said Kong a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Kong the lead author of the Oct 31 article describing the current work in the journal Nano Letters said that the contact lens project on the other hand involved the printing of active electronics using diverse materials.
Hyoungsoo Kim a postdoctoral research associate and fluid dynamics expert in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department;
Dan Steingart an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center helped design and build the new printer
Our approach reduces the cost of nanolithography to the point where it could be done in your garage says Dr. Chih-Hao Chang an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the work.
and light materials especially those that could help to protect the atmosphere including lighter more fuel efficient
#Toward a low-cost'artificial leaf'that produces clean hydrogen fuel For years scientists have been pursuing artificial leaf technology a green approach to making hydrogen fuel that copies plants'ability to convert sunlight into a form of energy they can use.
Peidong Yang Bin Liu and colleagues note that harnessing sunlight to split water and harvest hydrogen is one of the most intriguing ways to achieve clean energy.
Producing hydrogen at low cost from water using the clean energy from the sun would make this form of energy
and exposed to sunlight produces hydrogen gas. The scientists say that the technique could allow their technology to be scaled up at low cost.
In addition graphene membranes could be used to sieve hydrogen gas out of the atmosphere where it is present in minute quantities,
For example it would take the lifetime of the universe for hydrogen the smallest of all atoms to pierce a graphene monolayer.
The Manchester group also demonstrated that their one-atom-thick membranes can be used to extract hydrogen from a humid atmosphere.
The researchers led by Professor Joel K. W. Yang at A*STAR (the Agency for Science Technology
To demonstrate how these nanopixels could enable high-resolution 3d color microprints the researchers designed a stereoscopic image containing stars on a 2d sheet by overlaying two slightly displaced views of the same image onto the same area.
The other four peaks include Sustainable Earth New Media the East-West knowledge hub and Innovation Asia.
Last spring Fan received a proof-of-concept grant from the Department of energy through the North Central Regional Sun Grant Center to determine
Sun Grant promotes collaboration among researchers from land-grant institutions government agencies and the private sector to develop
#New nanocomposites for aerospace and automotive industries The Center for Research in Advanced Materials (CIMAV) has developed reinforced graphite nanoplatelets seeking to improve the performance of solar cell materials.
this allows us to move into the automotive construction aerospace textile and electronics sectors which are demanding
While they are not nearly as efficient as silicon-based solar cells in collecting sunlight and transforming it into electricity,
The new dye-sensitized solar cells were as much as 20 percent better at converting sunlight into power,
These characteristics mark the trail heads of a variety of paths for research on this nanocomposite material for applications from flexible armor to aerospace components.
To control their micro-swimmers the researchers integrated tiny rare-earth magnets in the two scallop shells.
and reduce carbon dioxide emissions on the earth Shimoi said d
#Physicists set new records for silicon quantum computing Two research teams working in the same laboratories at UNSW Australia have found distinct solutions to a critical challenge that has held back the realisation of super
Over the years scientists have been very successful at making complex 3d shapes from DNA using diverse strategies said Wei Sun a postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss'Molecular Systems Lab
and functionally-relevant materials such as gold and silver Sun said. Just as any expanding material can be shaped inside a mold to take on a defined 3d form the Wyss team set out to grow inorganic particles within the confined hollow spaces of stiff DNA nanostructuresthe concept can be likened to the Japanese method of growing watermelons in glass cubes.
from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the paper.
a Phd student from the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Leeds and the lead author of the research paper.
Professor Evans and his team have all of the membrane proteins required to construct a fully working mimic of the way plants capture sunlight.
This has become possible by employing a remarkable physical effect the spin-orbit coupling of light.
The effect is called"spin-orbit-coupling of light"."Coupling Rotation and the Direction of Motion
A group of researchers from the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology (IBN) of A*STAR has taken the health benefits of green tea to the next level by using one of its ingredients to develop a drug delivery system
or propulsion systems for fist-sized nanosatellites. In the latest issue of the IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical systems Velsquez-Garca his graduate students Eric Heubel and Philip Ponce de Leon and Frances Hill a postdoc in his group describe a new prototype
Higher currents thus promise more-efficient manufacturing and more-nimble satellites. The same prototype also crams 1900 emitters onto a chip that's only a centimeter square quadrupling the array size and emitter density of even the best of its predecessors.
and not a beam of droplets says Herbert Shea an associate professor in the Microsystems for Space technologies Laboratory at the cole Polytechnique Fdrale de Lausanne.
Shea believes that at least in the near term the technology's most promising application is in spacecraft propulsion.
whereas it would take very little effort to use it as propulsion for small spacecraft he says.
The reason you'd like to be in ion mode is to have the most efficient conversion of the mass of the propellant into the momentum of the spacecraft t
It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light that reach Earth's surface from the sun but not much of the rest of the spectrum since that would increase the energy that is reradiated by the material
and has the additional benefits of absorbing sunlight from a wide range of angles and withstanding extremely high temperatures.
The sunlight's energy is converted first to heat which then causes the material to glow emitting light that can in turn be converted to an electric current.
In order to take maximum advantage of systems that concentrate sunlight using mirrors the material must be capable of surviving unscathed under very high temperatures Chou says.
And since the new material can absorb sunlight efficiently from a wide range of angles Chou says we don't need really solar trackers
In this paper the authors demonstrated in a system designed to withstand high temperatures the engineering of the optical properties of a potential solar thermophotovoltaic absorber to match the sun's spectrum.
HFML researcher Peter Christianen stated'Our chemist colleagues published an article recently about a type of nano rockets#vesicles
if we could steer these rockets with magnetic fields but to our surprise the vesicles opened during those experiments.
Now researchers at A*STAR have used a process known as friction stir processing (see image) to produce an evenly distributed mix of nanosized aluminum oxide (Al2o3) particles in aluminum.
Guo J. F. Liu J. Sun C. N. Maleksaeedi S. Bi G. et al. Effects of nano-Al2o3 particle addition on grain structure evolution and mechanical behaviour of friction-stir-processed Al.
#Experts create unique nanoparticles for aerospace industry A development of three universities enables improved thermal and electronic properties on devices with nickel-titanium alloys.
Experts collaborated to produce nanoparticles made of a titanium-nickel alloy used in the development of thermal and electrical sensors that control the operation of high-tech devices such as those used in aerospace,
Hydrogen is virtually everywhere on the planet, but the element is bonded typically with other elements
but also carbon dioxide greenhouse gas byproduct which escapes into the atmosphere. Argonne's early-stage generator, composed of many tiny assemblies,
Researchers have known long that some single-celled organisms use a protein called bacteriorhodopsin (br) to absorb sunlight
If the researchers wanted to power their generators with sunlight, they'd need to improve on that.
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