Lunar dust is sharp stuff. Created when micro-meteorites hit the moon’s surface and shatter into razor-blade-like bits of melted glass, the abrasive dust can cause a multitude of problems for astronauts and machinery.
Within a decade, NASA plans to begin building a permanent lunar colony to serve as an outpost en route to Mars.
So, the [...]

The Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (PAVE) team won “rookie of the year,” third place overall out of 47 teams and first place in the design challenge portion of the 16th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, held May 30 to June 2 at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.
The competition required student teams to design and create [...]

In the year 2020, Jerry the average American worker, yawns and wakes up to a dark room as his alarm goes off.  Sitting up in bed, he hits a switch on the wall by his bed adjusting the opacity of his windows, to let in more light.  As he walks to the bathroom, he taps [...]

Frontiers of health: Sight for sore eyes
Ultra-short laser pulses may allow easier LASIK
by Hilary Parker
Szymon Suckewer needs eye surgery, but he’s not going under the knife just yet—he’d rather wait until no knife is necessary. Having recently developed an incision-free eye surgery technique, he’s confident that will soon be an option.
 

Szymon Suckewer (center) takes an [...]

Much as human intuition is far better than artificial intelligence in making sense of the world, people are far better at imagining thinking machines than actually making them. Now a large, ambitious team of AI researchers has launched a long-term research campaign to narrow both [...]

Electrical and Computer Engineering Graduate Student Hao-Chih Yuan holds a sample of a semiconductor film on plastic. (Large image)

New thin-film semiconductor techniques invented by UW-Madison engineers promise to add sensing, computing and imaging capability to an amazing array of materials.
Historically, the semiconductor industry has relied on flat, two-dimensional chips upon which to [...]