News by Subject Technology & Engineering

When engineers or designers wanted to test the aerodynamic properties of the newly designed car or an airplane, the procedure usually took hours or even a day. Nobuyuki Umetani and Bernd Bickel have now significantly sped up this process, making streamlines and parameters available in real-time. Their method, which is the first to use machine learning to model flow around continuously editable 3D objects, will be presented at this year's prestigious SIGGRAPH conference in Vancouver.

Fruit flies don't appear to use their tiny, translucent wings for optimal flight, as one might expect. The speedy appendages seem to be doing double duty, helping the insect sniff out food, mates and other important scents, according to new research from The Ohio State University.

U of T Engineering researchers studied the eye movements of drivers at busy Toronto intersections and found that more than half failed to make necessary scans for pedestrians or cyclists at right turns. This is the first study to date that used eye-tracking equipment to accurately assess where drivers were looking when turning at an intersection.

A University of Manchester Ph.D. student has developed a prototype flexible heat shield for spacecraft that could reduce the cost of space travel and even aid future space missions to Mars.

Through innovative use of a neural network that mimics image processing by the human brain, a research team reports accurate reconstruction of images transmitted over optical fibers for distances of up to a kilometer.

Researchers have developed a new technique to control self-folding three-dimensional (3D) structures. Specifically, the researchers use templates to constrain deformation in certain selected areas on a two-dimensional structure, which in turn dictates the resulting 3D structure of the material.

These are ORNL story tips: residents' shared desire for water security benefits neighborhoods; 3D printed molds for concrete facades promise lower cost, production time; ORNL engineered the edges of structures in 2D crystals; chasing runaway electrons in fusion plasmas; new tools to understand US waterways and identify potential hydropower sites; and better materials for 3D printed permanent magnets could last longer, perform better.