Baxter, PR2, quadcopters and other robots and robotic devices will demonstrate their skills at a Robot Block Party Saturday, April 5, 2014, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Pizzitola Sports Center at Brown University. The activities, free and open to the public, mark the start of National Robotics Week.
The eternal ebb and flow of tides makes them a dependable source of energy, but how to harness all that, especially in shallow water? Shreyas Mandre and colleagues at Brown have developed an efficient water wing and optimized its performance with a secret sauce.
The eternal ebb and flow of tides makes them a dependable source of energy, but how to harness all that, especially in shallow water? Shreyas Mandre and colleagues at Brown have developed an efficient water wing and optimized its performance with a “secret sauce.”
An international conference of planetary geologists and NASA representatives, March 15-16, 2014, will begin discussions of destinations and scientific goals for the next generation of human space flight beyond low-Earth orbit. Well-trained human explorers, organizers say, can make discoveries robotic missions might miss.
Encryption might not be enough for all that data stored in the cloud. An analysis of usage patterns — which files are accessed and when — can give away secrets as well. Computer scientists at Brown have developed an algorithm to sweep away those digital footprints. It’s a complicated series of dance-like moves they call the Melbourne Shuffle.
Using images from NASA’s Voyager Mission (1979) and the orbital Galileo Mission (1995), researchers have created the first global geological map of Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede.
A team of Brown students is building a “nanosatellite” — a four-inch cube weighing about two pounds — that will find its way into Earth orbit aboard a NASA rocket sometime in the three-year period beginning in 2015. EQUiSat will have an LED beacon visible to the naked eye at night and will broadcast data about its health and position.
Graphene, a sheet of carbon one atom thick, may soon have a new nanomaterial partner. In the lab and on supercomputers, chemists have determined that a unique arrangement of 36 boron atoms in a flat disc with a hexagonal hole in the middle may be the preferred building blocks for "borophene" Findings are reported in Nature Communications.
A new class of molecules called acyldepsipeptidesm, ADEPs, may provide a new way to attack bacteria that have developed resistance to antibiotics. Researchers at Brown and MIT have discovered a way to increase the potency of ADEPs by up to 1,200 times. Their findings appear in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
From the first human footprints on the Moon to the tracks of Curiosity on Mars, Brown geologists have been making crucial contributions to the international exploration of the solar system. The Apollo astronauts were trained in lunar geology by Brown faculty. Since then, Brown scientists have been involved in missions and discoveries on the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, asteroids and the moons of other worlds.
