Tartan Racing, Pittsburgh, PA wins the Darpa Urban challenge

DARPA Urban Challenge winners announced. 1st Place – Tartan Racing (Carnegie Mellon), Pittsburgh, PA2nd Place – Stanford Racing Team, Stanford, CA3rd Place – Victor Tango, Blacksburg, VA There is more post-race coverage at CNet and all over the web. Lidar was a key technology used in the robotic cars.Advancement in LIDAR capabilities is something that …

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Ultrasensitive prototype device approaches gold standard for magnetic field detection

A tiny sensor that can detect magnetic field changes as small as 70 femtoteslas-equivalent to the brain waves of a person daydreaming-has been demonstrated at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The sensor could be battery-operated and could reduce the costs of non-invasive biomagnetic measurements such as fetal heart monitoring. The device also …

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Scanning tunneling microscope made 100 to 1000 times faster

From physorg.com, using an existing technique in a novel way, Cornell physicist Keith Schwab and colleagues at Cornell and Boston University have made the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) — which can image individual atoms on a surface — at least 100 times faster. The simple adaptation, based on a method of measurement currently used in …

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