Super-lightweight Robot Friendly Modular Construction for Bridges and Space Colonization

NASA Ames team created and tested prefabricated voxels standardized reconfigurable building blocks. They built a set of 256 of those blocks—extremely strong 3D structures made with a carbon-fiber-reinforced polymer called StattechNN-40CF. Each block had fastening interfaces on every side that could be used to reversibly attach them to other blocks and form a strong truss …

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Metamaterials Trap Light in a Magnet Could Lead to Optically Controlled Computer Memory

Vinod M. Menon and his research group at The City College of New York shows that trapping light inside magnetic materials may dramatically enhance their intrinsic properties. Strong optical responses of magnets are important for the development of magnetic lasers and magneto-optical memory devices, as well as for emerging quantum transduction applications. The properties of …

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Kilometer Structures in Space

Zac Manchester is working on a phase 2 NASA NIAC (advanced innovation) study to create kilometer sized structures in space that will fit in one rocket payload. Zac Manchester worked on Breakthrough Starshot which is trying to get a laser pushed solar sail to another star system. (aka 4+ light years in a human lifetime). …

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One Falcon Heavy Launch of a Kilometer-Scale Space Station With 1G of Gravity With No Motion Sickness

Generating artificial gravity inside rotating space habitats has been a dream of science fiction since the earliest pioneers of astronautics. However, rotating to produce artificial gravity poses a serious challenge; Humans experience discomfort and motion sickness when exposed to rotation rates greater than a few RPM. To produce artificial gravity near 1g at rotation rates …

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Dynamically Programmable Wireless 6G

A visionary EU 6G research project, called RISE-6G, will create next-generation wireless connectivity. RISE-6G will design, prototype and test smart and energy-sustainable technological advances based on reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) that will enable programmable control and shaping of the wireless propagation environment. They expect to deploy by 2030. They will use surfaces of diode-based antennas …

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Extreme Metamaterial Solar Sails for Over 0.1% of Light Speed

Understanding the beginnings of the Universe and life itself is NASA’s long term vision and one of humanities’ grand challenges. Missions to the edge of our solar system and to space between stars in our galaxy – the interstellar medium – are of a great promise to shed light on these questions. However, today’s deep …

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Roadmap for Lab Experiments for Warp Drive

Joseph Agnew, undergrad and research assistant from the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Propulsion Research Center (PRC), presented the results of his study “An Examination of Warp Theory and Technology to Determine the State of the Art and Feasibility“. This was part of a session at The Future of Nuclear and Breakthrough Propulsion”. The detection …

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Improved Solar Sail

The conventional means of collecting and redirecting solar sail light uses a metal-coated polyimide film but this is sub-optimal and unstable because the very large and very thin sail must be rapidly slewed away from the sun line for navigational purposes. Stability rigging and attitude control devices add mass to the sailcraft, thereby reducing the …

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Acoustic Metamaterials Can Block 94% of Sounds

Synthetic, sound-silencing structures—acoustic metamaterials can block 94% of sounds. This ring of materials will be able to make vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, fans and other devices and products much quieter. Boston University researchers Ghaffarivardavagh and Zhang wanted to block sound but not open air. They calculated the dimensions and specifications that the metamaterial would need …

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Metamaterial to bend sound around large objects could open up many other cloaking applications

Amanda D. Hanford, at Pennsylvania State University, is taking the introductory steps to make acoustic ground cloaks. These materials redirect approaching waves around an object without scattering the wave senergy, concealing the object from the sound waves. Potentially this could be applied to sonar cloaking for submarines or other objects in the ocean. During the …

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