News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Walls are what they are -- big, dull dividers. With a few applications of conductive paint and some electronics, however, walls can become smart infrastructure that sense human touch, and detect things like gestures and when appliances are used. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Disney Research found that they could transform dumb walls into smart walls at relatively low cost using simple tools and techniques, such as a paint roller.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas developed a way to extract more power from the wind. The researchers used supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to filter out the effects of turbulence and apply control algorithms that can better manage the operation of wind farms. The approach has the potential to increase wind power generation by 6-7 percent with a estimated increase in revenue of more than $600 million nationwide.

By using network analysis to search for communities of marine life in the fossil records of the Paleobiology Database, the team, including researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was able to quantify the ecological impacts of major events like mass extinctions and may help us anticipate the consequences of a 'sixth mass extinction.'

A new microchip technology capable of optically transferring data could solve a severe bottleneck in current devices by speeding data transfer and reducing energy consumption by orders of magnitude, according to an article published in the April 19, 2018 issue of Nature.

A new technique co-developed at MIT can assemble optical and electronic components separately on the surface of a computer chip, enabling the addition of optical components to existing chips with little design modification.

Engineers at the University of Washington have developed a new HD video streaming method that doesn't need to be plugged in. Their prototype skips power-hungry components and has something else, like a smartphone, process the video instead.