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Category: engineering – Page 115

Unfortunately, some of the data is lost forever. 🧐

#engineering

A routine backup procedure meant to safeguard data of researchers at Kyoto University in Japan went awry and deleted 77 terabytes of data, Gizmodo reported. The incident occurred between December 14 and 16, first came to light on the 16th, and affected as many as 14 research groups at the university.

Supercomputers are the ultimate computing devices available to researchers as they try to answer complex questions on a range of topics from molecular modeling to oil exploration, climate change models to quantum mechanics, to name a few. Capable of making hundred quadrillion operations a second, these computers are not only expensive to build but also to operate, costing hundreds of dollars for every hour of operation.

According to Bleeping Computer that originally reported the mishap, the university uses Cray supercomputers with the top system employing 122,400 computing cores. The memory on the system though is limited to approximately 197 terabytes and therefore, an Exascaler data storage system is used, which can transfer 150 GB of data per second and store up to 24 petabytes of information.

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Defense company Raytheon has clinched a US Navy contract to provide engineering and technical services for the Evolved Seasparrow Missile and NATO Seasparrow Missile programs, the Pentagon has said.

A press release by the Department of Defense on December 30 stated, “Raytheon Company [of] Tucson, Arizona, is awarded a $55,121,826 modification to a previously awarded contract for engineering and technical services in support of the Evolved Seasparrow Missile and NATO Seasparrow Missile Systems programs.”

The contract combines purchases for the US government (99%); and those of Japan and the United Arab Emirates (1%) under the Foreign Military Sales program.

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Thyme and oregano possess an anti-cancer compound that suppresses tumor development, but adding more to your tomato sauce isn’t enough to gain significant benefit. The key to unlocking the power of these plants is in amplifying the amount of the compound created or synthesizing the compound for drug development.

Researchers at Purdue University achieved the first step toward using the compound in pharmaceuticals by mapping its biosynthetic pathway, a sort of molecular recipe of the ingredients and steps needed.

“These plants contain important compounds, but the amount is very low and extraction won’t be enough,” said Natalia Dudareva, a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry in Purdue’s College of Agriculture, who co-led the project. “By understanding how these compounds are formed, we open a path to engineering plants with higher levels of them or to synthesizing the compounds in microorganisms for medical use.

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James Webb Tracker! #NASA #WEBB
#JWST #NASA #JamesWebbLaunch.
LIMITED EDITION Launch Commemorative Shirt — www.etsy.com/shop/TheLaunchPadShop.

James Webb Space Telescope launched on Saturday, Dec 25 at 12:20 UTC from Guiana Space Centre. Webb Telescope liftoff aboard Ariane 5 rocket.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a space telescope being jointly developed by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency. It is planned to succeed the Hubble Space Telescope as NASA’s Flagship astrophysics mission.

With revolutionary technology, Webb will observe a part of space and time never seen before, providing a wealth of amazing views into an era when the very first stars and galaxies formed–over 13.5 billion years ago.

Webb is NASA’s largest and most powerful space science telescope ever constructed. Webb’s enormous size and frigid operating temperature present extraordinary engineering challenges.

After launching from French Guiana, the observatory will travel to an orbit about one million miles away from Earth and undergo six months of commissioning in space—unfolding its mirrors, sunshield, and other smaller systems, cooling down, aligning, and calibrating.

Continue reading “SUNSHIELD OPENING DAY! — James Webb Tracker! #NASA #WEBB” | >

Imagine windows that can easily transform into mirrors, or super high-speed computers that run not on electrons but light. These are just some of the potential applications that could emerge from optical engineering, the practice of using lasers to rapidly and temporarily change the properties of materials.

“These tools could let you transform the electronic properties of materials at the flick of a light switch,” says Caltech Professor of Physics David Hsieh. “But the technologies have been limited by the problem of the lasers creating too much heat in the materials.”

In a new study in Nature, Hsieh and his team, including lead author and graduate student Junyi Shan, report success at using lasers to dramatically sculpt the properties of materials without the production of any excess damaging heat.

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While rotating at up to 10 degrees per second!

The technological competition between the United States and China is growing at breakneck speeds.

A small and relatively low-cost satellite by China can allegedly take high-resolution images of cities in mere seconds, The South China Morning Post first reported. The images are allegedly so detailed that they can be used to identify specific military vehicles and weapons.

An impressive act proving this statement was performed by Beijing-3, a small commercial satellite launched by China in June. Beijing-3 conducted an in-depth scan of the San Francisco Bay, which corresponds to roughly 1,470 sq mi (3,800 sq km), within 42 seconds, according to scientists involved in the satellite project who published the results this month in the Chinese peer-reviewed journal Spacecraft Engineering.

Full Story:

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It burns about half the fuel of the same-sized rotorcraft.

In 1989, Vox conceptualized fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing airframes (VTOL), along with a plethora of sketches that looked straight out of a sci-fi movie, for a way to innovate the idea. Several prototypes and component tests later, the aircraft is in its final stages of assembly, and testing is expected to start next year.

Revolving around the concept of increasing the safety and convenience of the passenger, this hybrid aircraft can also fly three times faster than a helicopter.

“Our aircraft can travel at turboprop speeds and land on nearly any helipad in the world,” Brian Morgan, the COO and EVP of engineering at Vox, told Robb Report. “Like any helicopter, it provides the flexibility and ease of point-to-point travel, but at two to three times the speed, with more comfort and the ability to fly above the weather, all while burning about half the fuel of the same-sized rotorcraft performing the same mission,” he said.

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Created as an analogy for Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) — which describes the interactions due to the electromagnetic force carried by photons — Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) is the theory of physics that explains the interactions mediated by the strong force — one of the four fundamental forces of nature.

A new collection of papers published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics and edited by Diogo Boito, Instituto de Fisica de Sao Carlos, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Irinel Caprini, Horia Hulubei National Institute for Physics and Nuclear Engineering, Bucharest, Romania, brings together recent developments in the investigation of QCD.

The editors explain in a special introduction to the collection that due to a much stronger coupling in the — carried by gluons between quarks, forming the fundamental building blocks of matter — described by QCD, than the , the divergence of perturbation expansions in the mathematical descriptions of a system can have important physical consequences. The editors point out that this has become increasingly relevant with recent high-precision calculations in QCD, due to advances in the so-called higher-order loop computations.

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Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology show that strain on ventricular walls explains where lesions develop in the aging brain.

As our brains age, small lesions begin to pop up in the bundles of white matter that carry messages between our neurons. The lesions can damage this white matter and lead to cognitive deficits. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology and colleagues not only provide an explanation for the location of these lesions but also how they develop in the first place.

The work, led by Johannes Weickenmeier, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens, highlights the importance of viewing the brain as more than neural circuitry that underpins how thoughts are formed, and memories created. It’s also a physical object that’s prone to glitches and mechanical failures. “The brain is susceptible to wear and tear in vulnerable areas,” Weickenmeier said. “Especially in an aging brain, we need to look at its biomechanical properties to better understand how things can start to go wrong.”

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