Your driving frustrations may soon be relieved, if city planners adopt a newself-organizing system for traffic lights.
European engineers have designed and tested a system that would give each traffic signal a sensor, to read the current traffic situation, and a computer chip, to calculate the expected flow of vehicles and then determine how long the light should stay green.
Still searching for a new backpack this school season? Look no further than UC Berkeley Labs, where engineers have created a laser-scanning backpack that makes instant 3D maps of its surroundings. It may not have room for textbooks, but it can generate perfect digital likenesses of the inside of just about any building.
Developed in collaboration with the US Airforce, this device could allow troops to quickly and efficiently scout out new areas and map battlefield locations.
The backpack is outfitted with four cameras pointing in different directions, lasers, and an inertial measurement unit (IMU).
Today, everyone’s favorite plumber celebrates his 25th anniversary. To commemorate a quarter century of Super Mario Bros, the folks at Nintendo have put together this nifty retrospective video – watch how the game has changed (and stayed the same) over the years:
Engineering students Victor Correa Schneider, Trevor Owen, Julia Tsai, Dan Ferguson, and Benjamin Thompson of UC San Diego
Duuuude, how’s this for a Ph.D. project: Benjamin Thompson, a structural engineering student at UC San Diego, is on a quest to formulate the science of surfboards. He enlisted the help of four undergraduates in the mechanical engineering department to help him out, and together they hit the beach to find out more.
Here’s some good news for all the Transformers fans out there: researchers at Harvard and MIT have been busy creating new smart material that can change its shape on command. Called “programmable matter by folding,” this nifty robotics project involves wiring flexible alloys and programming them to fold themselves into origami-like shapes.
The current prototype can fold itself into a boat or an airplane depending on the signal it receives – watch in this video [after the jump]:
