News by Subject Technology & Engineering

An international research team has proposed a way to increase the efficiency of wireless power transfer over long distances and tested it with numerical simulations and experiments. To achieve this, they beamed power between two antennas, one of which was excited with a back-propagating signal of specific amplitude and phase. The new development will improve wireless power transmission. This study also offers new approaches to wireless communication, where external conditions can change unpredictably.

MIT CSAIL's 'RoadTracer' system could reduce workload for developers of apps like Google Maps

Each year, the effects of corroding materials sap more than $1 trillion from the global economy. As certain alloys are exposed to extreme stress and temperatures, an oxide film begins to form, causing the alloys to break down even more quickly. What precisely makes these conditions so conducive for corrosion, however, remains poorly understood, especially in microelectromechanical devices. Chinese researchers have started to chip away at why these materials corrode under mechanical stress.

Going to the beach this summer? European tourists are more frequently going to places with significant tsunami risk, researchers have found. A global tourism destination risk index for tsunamis was released today at the 2018 Annual Conference of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna. It is based on a study led by Andreas Schaefer of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) that examined all prominent tourism destinations globally with regard to the potential impact for businesses.

Researchers have been pushing the capabilities of materials by carefully designing precise structures that exhibit abnormal properties that can control acoustic or optical waves. However, these metamaterials are constructed in fixed geometries, meaning their unique abilities are always fixed. Now, new 3-D printed metamaterial developed by a team led by University of Southern California researchers can be remotely switched between active control and passive states.

Sewage treatment may be an unglamorous job, but bacteria are happy to do it. Sewage plants rely on bacteria to remove environmental toxins from waste so that the processed water can be safely discharged into oceans and rivers. Now, a bacterium discovered by Princeton researchers in a New Jersey swamp may offer a more efficient method for treating toxins found in sewage, fertilizer runoff and other forms of water pollution.

A KAIST research team has identified the formation of natural gas hydrates, so-called flammable ice, formed in oceans.