engineer
Researchers report creating a small swatch of heart tissue that displays many of the hallmarks of mature cardiac tissue, including regular contractions. ''We have been trying to engineer a patch of tissue that has the same properties as native heart tissue, or myocardium, that could be attached over injured myocardium... Think of it as a patch for a broken heart.''
A laminate that protects NASCAR racecar windshields from rocks and debris will soon give extra protection to Army helicopters flying in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army's Aviation Applied Technology Directorate at Fort Eustis, Va., started testing the concept in March and just got the green light to begin applying the Mylar polyester coating to the windshields of operational aircraft. Nathan Bordick, an engineer working on the project, said the Army borrowed the idea from NASCAR, where teams have been applying multiple layers of the peelable coatings to vehicle windshields for years to resist cracking, chipping and scratching. Periodically throughout a race, pit crews peel away a layer, leaving a clear, undamaged windshield for the laps ahead, he said.
A British engineer believes he can secure cost effective tidal power by innovatively placing existing turbine designs inside large bore underwater pipes. Don Cutler's view is that it's best to use everything that's standard. ''You don't re-invent the wheel you improve it.'' ''Sea water is a most aggressive environment, but using modern materials like carbon fibres, and Teflon, are about the only clever things about my design,'' he says. Cutler's design is specifically aimed at taking advantage of straight tides. ''With a tide running at 5-6 knots you can get all the power you need,'' he says.
A smoldering coal fire ? and the continuing attempt to control it through the voyage ? may have led to the sinking of the Titanic 92 years ago, says engineer Robert Essenhigh of Ohio State University. While everyone knows it was a collision with an iceberg that sank the White Star Liner on her maiden voyage, nobody knows why the Titanic was sailing full steam through a known iceberg field at night. Coal's tendency to ignite and smolder while stored may provide the answer, says Essenhigh. There are records that there was such a fire in the Titanic's forward bunker #6.
Light is so fast that it takes less than 2 seconds to travel from the Earth to the moon. This blazing fast speed is what makes the Internet and other complex communications systems possible. But sometimes light needs to be slowed down so that signals can be routed in the right direction and order, converted from one form to another or synchronized properly. Now, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have proposed a new way to slow light down to almost one-millionth its usual speed--to the mere speed of a jet aircraft. The method eventually could help simplify and reduce the cost of high-speed optical communications.
It was Survival 101. Wearing camouflage gear and taste testing leaves and roots probably was not the kind of training NASA's new group of astronauts had anticipated, but that's the way it was. The 11 astronaut candidates, including educator astronauts, military pilots, physicians, an astrophysicist, an engineer and a Navy SEAL, did Land Survival Training at the Navy's wilderness site near Rangeley, Maine. With them were three Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronauts. The training began early Monday with an introduction and gear pick-up -- standard camouflage clothing, two canteens, a bayonet, iodine tablets, a poncho with liner, a compass and a map.
An engineer has developed a new technology that uses light-activated glue to hold workpieces in position for machining, grinding and other manufacturing processes. The technique uses light to harden the super-strong glue in seconds, and lasers to dissolve the link just as quickly once the work is complete. The yield strength of the cured adhesive bond is greater than 5500 pounds per square inch.
A California engineer has discovered a way to manufacture composite ''nanocables'' from a potent new class of substances with extraordinary properties called Transition Metal Oxides. Chongwu Zhou is creating dense arrays of ultrafine wires made of magnesium oxide, each coated with uniform, precisely controlled layers of TMO.
Biochemists have used computational design to engineer and construct a protein that could sense the nerve agent soman. They said their achievement constitutes a proof-of principle that such engineered proteins can be made to detect nerve agents such as sarin and other toxic substances.
NASA's successful X-43A hypersonic research aircraft flight resulted in a treasure trove of scramjet data. The initial data review, conducted on March 31, confirmed high-fidelity flight data was obtained throughout the vehicle's boost, stage separation and descent to splash down. "The data clearly shows, and without question, that scramjets work," said X-43A chief engineer Griff Corpening of NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center (DFRC), Edwards, Calif. "But we did see a couple of areas that differed from what was seen in the wind tunnels, thus reinforcing the need for flight testing," he said.
Nasa has developed a Web-based software tool meant to help scientists and engineers investigating accidents work more effectively and efficiently. The InvestigationOrganizer, developed at NASA Ames Research Center, is a Web-based tool that provides information storage, management, and analysis capabilities to accident investigation teams. Current investigating and reporting methods used by NASA's mishap investigation teams tend to be disparate and cumbersome. Teams have no standard methods or tools for information storage, management, dissemination or analysis ? all issues that InvestigationOrganizer is designed to address.
Within the smoothly operating factory that is the cell, tiny molecular machines carry out their tasks with order and certainty. Or at least that's what many scientists once believed. In a recent issue of Science, researchers report the first demonstration that bacterial cells intrinsically possess a significant degree of randomness or "noise." More precisely, they show that key "gene-reading" machines may operate unpredictably, resulting in randomly fluctuating amounts of individual proteins.
Using neural stem cells to hunt down and kill cancer cells, researchers have successfully tested a new treatment for brain cancer. They now hope the technique will lead to an effective treatment for glioma, the most aggressive form of primary brain tumor in humans. As the Cedars-Sianai researchers note, the prognosis has historically been extremely poor for patients diagnosed with malignant gliomas. The tumors have poorly defined margins, and glioma cells often spread deep into healthy brain tissue making their surgical removal difficult. Often, pockets of tumor cells break off from the main tumor and migrate deep into non-tumorous areas of the brain. Therefore, even if the original tumor is completely removed or destroyed, the risk of recurrence is high as cells in these distant "satellites" multiply and eventually re-form a new brain tumor. Due to these characteristics, treating brain cancer has been extremely difficult.
