News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Cornell University researchers are expressing hope for the future of Houston's breathable air, despite the city's poor rankings in the American Lung Association's 2019 'State of the Air' report. The report, released in April, ranked Houston ninth nationally for worst ozone pollution and 17th for particle pollution. Researchers say replacing at least 35 percent of Houston's gasoline cars and diesel trucks with electric vehicles by 2040 will reduce pollution and improve air quality by 50 percent.

A team of roboticists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and MIT has developed a new way to design pistons that replaces their conventional rigid elements with a mechanism using compressible structures inside a membrane made of soft materials. The resulting 'tension pistons' generate more than three times the force of comparable conventional pistons, eliminate much of the friction, and at low pressures are up to 40 percent more energy efficient.

Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has announced the release of ActiveVision, a machine vision tool that transportation agencies can use to autonomously detect and report traffic condition changes. ActiveVision's algorithms process camera data to provide real-time information on weather conditions and other anomalies affecting congestion. Designed for integration with intelligent transportation systems (ITS), ActiveVision can be configured with existing traffic cameras to analyze roadway conditions with no human monitoring required.

Control engineers and AI experts team up to make drones that fly more smoothly close to the ground.

Aluminum is one of the most promising materials for aeronautics and automobile industry. Scientists from the National University of Science and Technology 'MISIS' found a simple and efficient way of strengthening aluminum-based composite materials. Doping aluminum melt with nickel and lanthanum, scientists managed to create a material combining benefits of both composite materials and standard alloys: flexibility, strength, lightness. The article on the research is published in Materials Letters.

University of Washington researchers have developed a novel solution to help reduce impact forces -- for potential applications in spacecraft, cars and beyond.