News by Subject Technology & Engineering

The first step a Vanderbilt team took in addressing a challenge in lower-body prosthetics was coming to understand the way people with two legs catch themselves, accomplished by covering test subjects with motion-capturing sensors.

The mesmerizing sight of ice crystals floating around the bubble made the engineers wonder what caused the phenomenon

Purdue University researchers have developed a smartphone app that allows a user to easily program any robot to perform a task, dramatically bringing down the costs of building and programming mobile robots.

Cornell University researchers are expressing hope for the future of Houston's breathable air, despite the city's poor rankings in the American Lung Association's 2019 'State of the Air' report. The report, released in April, ranked Houston ninth nationally for worst ozone pollution and 17th for particle pollution. Researchers say replacing at least 35 percent of Houston's gasoline cars and diesel trucks with electric vehicles by 2040 will reduce pollution and improve air quality by 50 percent.

Some have dreamt of the perfect cloak to make buildings impervious to stress waves caused by bombs, earthquakes or other calamities. Sorry, researchers are now dashing the dream. But there's still hope. They also say it's possible to make imperfect, real-world cloaks that will actually do some good by adding significant partial protection against some common earthquake waves.

A team of roboticists at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and MIT has developed a new way to design pistons that replaces their conventional rigid elements with a mechanism using compressible structures inside a membrane made of soft materials. The resulting 'tension pistons' generate more than three times the force of comparable conventional pistons, eliminate much of the friction, and at low pressures are up to 40 percent more energy efficient.