Engineering - News

by Prachi Patel

A thin membranes made from a web of nanowires might become a promising tool for cleaning up oil spills and removing toxic contaminants from groundwater. When dipped into a mixture of water and oil, the 50-micrometer-thick membrane absorbs the oil, swelling to 20 times its weight.

Typically, oil spills are cleaned up using the same basic technology used 20 years ago. This includes using absorbent materials to sop up traces of oil. Natural sorbents such as hay and cellulose can soak up between 3 and 15 times their weight in oil, while synthetic polymer-based sorbents can absorb up to 70 times their weight. But these materials tend to absorb water as well.

Read more: Nano Sponge For Oil Spills

Engineering - News

Scientists can now listen to a set of solar wind data that’s usually represented visually, as numbers or graphs. University of Michigan researchers have “sonified” the data. They’ve created an acoustic, or musical, representation of it.

The researchers’ primary goal was to try to hear information that their eyes might have missed in solar wind speed and particle density data gathered by NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer satellite. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun.

Read more: Scientists Listen to the Sun in New Sonification Project

Engineering - News

by David Chandler

New message beamed to the stars commemorates Earth’s first attempt to reach out to intelligent aliens

Alien beings on faraway planets may not have noticed, but it’s been 35 years since human beings made the first deliberate effort to send them a message.

In 1974, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake, both working at Cornell University, used the world’s biggest and most powerful radio telescope to transmit a one-of-a-kind three-minute message. It consisted of 1,679 bits — ones and zeroes — and was cleverly designed to produce a simple image revealing something about humans’ size and shape, our solar system, the dish that sent the message, and even the biochemistry of our bodies.

Read more: ET Check Your Voicemail

Engineering - News

The evolution of NDCX-II

Imagine yourself at the core of Jupiter, a planet 300 times the mass of Earth. At 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit, you and I might think it’s hot in here, but to a physicist it’s merely warm – warm dense matter, to be precise, stuff that hasn’t quite undergone thermonuclear fusion yet.

Warm dense matter exists not only in the interiors of gas giant planets but in other high-temperature, high-pressure regimes as well – in a just-triggered nuclear bomb, for example, or when a fuel capsule in an inertial fusion experiment starts to implode.

Read more: On the Road to Fusion Energy, an Accelerator to Study Warm Dense Matter

Engineering - News

A collection of metamaterial rings efficiently absorbs microwave radiation the way black holes gobble up matter and light, and an optical-light analogue may not be far behind

Two researchers say they have built a cylinder that acts as an ersatz electromagnetic black hole, soaking up radiation in the microwave regime like the astrophysical version sucks up matter and light.

Qiang Cheng and Tie Jun Cui of the State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, detailed their creation in a paper posted to the online physics preprint Web site arXiv.org last week. Cheng and Cui report engineering a thin cylinder 21.6 centimeters in diameter comprising 60 concentric rings of so-called metamaterials—composite structures specifically crafted to possess unique light-bending capabilities.

Read more: Researchers Create an Electromagnetic "Black Hole" the Size of a Salad Plate

Engineering - News

by David Chandler, News Office

New analysis could lead to better lunar, Mars spacesuits

Anyone who has watched videos of the Apollo astronauts moving across the surface of the moon has noticed the unusual loping gait they sometimes adopted and their slow, almost graceful, movements. Now a new analysis by MIT researchers shows why astronauts moved around this way in their heavy Apollo-era space suits - and provides a mathematical method for evaluating new spacesuit designs for the moon and Mars and their effects on the efficiency of locomotion.

Read more: Taking Space in Stride