News by Subject Technology & Engineering

When engineers or designers wanted to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed car or an airplane, the procedure usually took hours or even a day. Nobuyuki Umetani and Bernd Bickel have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real-time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver.

U of T Engineering researchers studied the eye movements of drivers at busy Toronto intersections and found that more than half failed to make necessary scans for pedestrians or cyclists at right turns. This is the first study to date that used eye-tracking equipment to accurately assess where drivers were looking when turning at an intersection.

These are ORNL story tips: residents' shared desire for water security benefits neighborhoods; 3D printed molds for concrete facades promise lower cost, production time; ORNL engineered the edges of structures in 2D crystals; chasing runaway electrons in fusion plasmas; new tools to understand US waterways and identify potential hydropower sites; and better materials for 3D printed permanent magnets could last longer, perform better.

Researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory and the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University developed a new technique to quickly teach robots novel traversal behaviors with minimal human oversight.

The study 'Contribution of MOTs to road safety and the protection of citizens' health and the environment,' conducted by the Motor Vehicle Safety Institute 'Duque de Santomauro' of Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, reveals that the Ministry of Transport tests (MOTs) prevent 133 deaths, nearly 12,000 injuries of differing severity and at least 17,700 traffic accidents a year.