Aeronautics & Space

Wind patterns – explained? Ocean currents, too?

By Eileen De Guire / May 4, 2012

Attentive readers will have noticed that I am a fan of the Scholarly Kitchen’s Friday blogger, Kent Anderson. Today he posted two interesting videos showing wind patterns that look like…

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Other materials stories that may be of interest

By / May 1, 2012

Check’ em out: Smart bridge: Iowa State engineers load new bridge with damage-detection gauges (Newswise) The new bridge over the Iowa River near downtown Iowa Falls is a major upgrade…

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DARPA says hypersonic vehicles need better high-temp materials data; UCSB team shows how to measure strain at high-temps

By Eileen De Guire / April 24, 2012

Distributions of surface height and in-plane strain of an angle interlock C/SiC composite at 1,200°C, measured by DIC. Line scans (in red) are used to correlate strains with the underlying…

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Boeing’s CTO John Tracy and industry leaders to speak on trends in materials and aerospace at ICC4

By Eileen De Guire / March 9, 2012

Boeing’s 787 making its debut in Europe at the Farnborough Airshow in England in 2010. The ICC4 Aerospace track focuses on opportunities for advanced engineered ceramics in new aircraft systems.…

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Other materials stories that may be of interest

By / February 28, 2012

Check ’em out: CMOS-based carbon nanotube pass-transistor logic integrated circuits (Nature Communications) Field-effect transistors based on carbon nanotubes have been shown to be faster and less energy consuming than their…

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ICC4 Plenary & keynote speakers (part 1): Interest in energy topics abound

By / February 20, 2012

From left, David Bem, Athanasios Konstandopoulos and Gary Calabrese. As ICC4 president Katherine Faber noted last week in her video invitation to the July 15-19 event in Chicago, the congress is designed…

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Flying machines and falling men

By Eileen De Guire / February 10, 2012

University of Pennsylvania researchers demonstrate swarming capability with a fleet of saucer-sized flying robots. Credit: GRASP, U. Pennsylvania; You Tube. Two stories about flight flitted across my field of view…

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National Research Council names 16 tech priorities for NASA

By Eileen De Guire / February 3, 2012

Space Shuttle Atlantis at liftoff in Feb. 2001 on a mission to deliver the module, Destiny, to the ISS. Development of lightweight materials for spacecraft of the future will reduce…

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Giant Magellan Telescope: U Arizona finishing first, casting second of seven 8.4-meter mirrors

By Eileen De Guire / January 19, 2012

Artist’s rendering of mirror arrangement for Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile. Credit: GMT. “Mirror, mirror on the wall/Who’s the best mirror maker of them all?” In the story of Snow…

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Wednesday materials fun: More jellyfish propulsion

By / October 18, 2011

We featured work before on the Naval Research Labs work with artificial jellyfish for aquatic sensor applications, but this is the first time I have seen the efficiency of jellyfish…

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