Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created a chip on which laser light interacts with a tiny cloud of atoms to serve as a miniature toolkit for measuring important quantities such as length with quantum precision. The design could be mass-produced with existing technology. Above – NIST’s prototype chip for …
World View Stratollites offer all the advantages of high-altitude balloons – low-cost, rapid deployability, and low-impact flight – with an innovative new development: the ability to fly a variety of trajectories – from circumnavigating the Earth to persistence over a specific location. Stratollites can maintain position over specific areas of interest for days, weeks, and …
The magazine Ikea ad, running in Sweden, encourages the reader to pee on it. If she does so, and is pregnant, the ad reveals previously invisible text offering a discounted price on a crib—using similar technology that pregnancy tests use to show a positive result. Reaction has been mostly positive—the ad is undeniably clever, after …
The MIT Camera Culture group present a new approach to time-of-flight imaging that increases its depth resolution 1,000-fold. That’s the type of resolution that could make self-driving cars practical. The new approach could also enable accurate distance measurements through fog, which has proven to be a major obstacle to the development of self-driving cars. At …
About 71% of the Earth is covered by the World Ocean for which the bottom topography (bathymetry) is far less known than the surfaces of Mercury, Venus, Mars, and several planets’ moons, including our own. Mapping through ocean water deeper than a few meters excludes the efficient use of electromagnetic waves such as radar and …
A regular ultrasound machine costs over $100,000 but a new ultrasound on a chip device attached to smartphone will be $2000 in 2018. It will be portable and will eventually make ultrasound as common as blood pressure cuffs in hospitals, clinics and doctors offices and with first responders and field medics. Butterfly iQ is FDA …
Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed the first miniature laser in which the light is guided along the floor of an open metallic trench. The laser could act as a nanoscale device to sense minute amounts of pollutants and other chemicals in the environment, or detect the surface binding …
Quantum physicists in Oriol Romero-Isart’s research group in Innsbruck show in two current publications that, despite Earnshaw’s theorem, nanomagnets can be stably levitated in an external static magnetic field owing to quantum mechanical principles. The quantum angular momentum of electrons, which also causes magnetism, is accountable for this mechanism. In 1842, British mathematician Samuel Earnshaw …
Startup AdaSky is creating a far infrared thermal camera called Viper for self driving cars. Viper is a breakthrough, complete-sensing solution to enable 24/7 driving, combining a far infrared thermal camera with advanced machine vision algorithms that lets autonomous vehicles see and understand the road in any lighting or weather condition. AdaSky’s advanced thermal sensing …
DARPA has new sensor that use virtually zero stand-by power. Then ovel sensors could improve situational awareness for warfighters, add smarts to Internet of Things. A research team at Northeastern University, led by Electrical and Computer Engineering Associate Professor Matteo Rinald has built sensors remain dormant and unattended but always alert, even for years, without …
Every day, 3800 robotic floats bob up and down, tracking temperatures in the world’s oceans, which sop up an estimated 90% of the heat from global warming. In the course of a decade, the international Argo array has provided one of the steadiest signatures of the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. But the floats go …