Engineering And Technology

Soldiers in Afghanistan are experimenting with smartphones engineered to better protect operational data designed by scientists at Vanderbilt University’s Institute for Software Integrated Systems. Douglas Schmidt, professor of computer science, is quoted. Read More

The Vanderbilt Aerospace Club will outfit its NASA Student Launch Project rocket with a modified camera to capture landing hazards. Read More

A paper first-authored by Vanderbilt graduate engineering student Michael King concludes that electronics designed to operate with ultra-low power likely will exhibit high sensitivity to electron-induced single-event upsets due to interference from solar flares, cosmic rays and the like. Read More

On a quiet street just off of Nashville's historic Music Row, a dedicated team of more than 100 researchers are developing software systems that may very well revolutionize the modern world. Read More

A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it, the way invisibility cloaks bend light. Jason Valentine, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, is quoted. Read More

Biomedical and chemical engineers at Vanderbilt University, working with a pathologist, have constructed a sponge-like, biodegradable tissue “scaffold” that releases an enzyme-blocking molecule to indirectly activate endogenous pathways and enhance tissue regeneration and wound healing. Read More

Recent advances in robotics technology make it possible to create prosthetics that can duplicate the natural movement of human legs which promises to dramatically improve the mobility of lower-limb amputees. Read More

Providing surgical robots with a new kind of machine intelligence that significantly extends their capabilities and makes them much easier and more intuitive for surgeons to operate is the goal of a major new grant announced as part of the National Robotics Initiative. Read More

A remote acoustic detection system designed to identify homemade bombs can determine the difference between those that contain low-yield and high-yield explosives. Read More

Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7. Cell phones with built-in power cells that recharge in seconds and work for weeks between charges: These are just two of the possibilities raised by a novel supercapacitor design invented by material scientists at Vanderbilt University. Read More