Since the Environmental Nature Center beginnings in 1971, it has utilized makeshift buildings and trailers to accommodate its classroom and gallery. These days, the building consists of a new classroom, gallery, and office space that showcase smart, sustainable design practices and strategies to teachers, students and the public. By using a universal, integrated design approach… »

To protect from potential terrorist attacks, federal buildings and other critical infrastructures are made with special windows that contain blast-resistant glass. However, that kind of glass is thick and expensive. Researchers at University of Missouri are developing and testing a new type of blast-resistant glass that will be thinner, lighter and less vulnerable to small-scale… »

You don’t need a vivid imagination to see the marketing possibilities or astonishing effect walk through screens can offer. FogScreen projection screen world premiere occurred in October 2002 at the Turku Science Fair in Turku, Finland. Volume production of the FogScreen Inia projection screen started in late 2004. The interactivity add-on debuted in June 2005,… »

Conventional minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is per­formed through small incisions in the patient’s skin, pre­serving healthy tissue. The surgeon works with long slender instruments, and is separated from the operation area. This arrangement challenges the surgeon’s skills due to lost hand-eye-coordination and missing direct manual con­tact to the operation area. Therefore, many sophisticated procedures cannot… »

In one of our previous articles we started to cover the features of ASIMO – one of the most advanced humanoid robots of today. Besides footsteps planning, ASIMO can understand three humans speaking simultaneously (to some degree). Hiroshi Okuno at Kyoto University, and Kazuhiro Nakadai at the Honda Research Institute in Saitama, both in Japan,… »

In this article we’re going to describe another great architectural achievement made for educational purpose. The Charles Hostler Student Center is in the campus of the American University of Beirut, and it provides a model for environmentally responsive design that meets the social needs of the campus and the larger region. It offers competitive and… »

Another great example of bio-mimetic robots is a solution many mariners, oil outfits, and the military have big hopes for. RoboClam, designed at the MIT, is meant to become the first “smart” anchor, a major departure from the prosaic piece of nautical gear that hasn’t changed much in centuries. Its present diminutive size is just… »

As researchers around the world work to uncover new materials to combat marine biofouling, the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) is supporting the development of novel approaches that are proving to be effective at biofouling prevention. In fact, the Naval Surface Warfare Center at Carderock (NSWCCD) estimates that biofouling reduces vessel speed by up… »