All Features
NIST
As 2022 draws to a close, we ask NIST’s senior researchers to look ahead to the new year and beyond. They research topics that affect all of us, from indoor air quality to cybersecurity. So we ask our fellows, “How will the technology you are working on today affect society in the years to come?”…
Marni Baker-Stein, Bridgett Paradise, Rodney Petersen
There’s a growing movement to increase competency and skills-based education and hiring practices in both the public and private sectors.
For example, the Executive Order on Modernizing and Reforming the Assessment and Hiring of Federal Job Candidates calls on the federal government to “ensure…
Rachel Gordon
The manufacturing industry (largely) welcomed artificial intelligence with open arms. Less of the dull, dirty, and dangerous? Say no more. Planning for mechanical assemblies still requires more than scratching out some sketches, of course—it’s a complex conundrum that means dealing with arbitrary…
Matthew Greenwood
Getting the most out of your older capital equipment is a priority for any manufacturer. Luckily, the technology needed to bring legacy equipment into the internet of things (IoT) is readily available.
Let’s take a look at some specific products and technologies businesses can use to bring legacy…
Adam Zewe
Engineers at MIT have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.
These durable, flexible solar cells—thinner than a human hair—are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide…
Jeffrey Heimgartner
As the U.S. manufacturing sector barrels toward a renaissance, the path ahead comes with challenges that many manufacturers may not be prepared for. The industry—which employs 12 million people and accounts for 11 percent of the U.S. GDP—has slowly crawled out of a decline, and it has the potential…
Vanessa Bates Ramirez
Austin, Texas-based 3D-printing construction company ICON has gotten some pretty significant projects off the ground in recent years, from a 50-home development in Mexico to a 100-home neighborhood in Texas. Recently the company won a NASA contract that will help it get an even bigger project much…
Bhushan Avsatthi
The very nature of healthcare construction and its specific infrastructural and functional needs pose significant challenges to the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. Crucial hospital spaces such as operation theaters and critical care centers need fail-proof connections to…
Tom Spendlove
Simulation is a necessity for automotive companies in the 21st century, and there’s pressure to use more of it for many reasons: 1) Electrification produces more heat sources that need CFD and thermal analysis to design dissipation strategies; 2) industrywide moves toward minimal or “zero”…
Lee Seok Hwai
Think innovation, and what comes to mind? For many, it invariably evokes big names like Apple and Tesla, their epoch-defining products ranging from the smartphone to electric vehicles, and genius leaders like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs. But is innovation only for the select few?
Not at all,…
David L. Chandler
Terahertz radiation, with wavelengths that lie between those of microwaves and visible light, can penetrate many nonmetallic materials and detect signatures of certain molecules.
These handy qualities could lend themselves to a wide array of applications, including airport security scanning,…
Anton Ovchinnikov
In the age of mass production, the demand for customization is increasing. Customers prefer products catered to their individual needs and preferences over standard items—albeit at a cost.
Fortunately, recent advances in information technology, logistics, and advanced manufacturing processes such…
Robert Zaruda
Northwest Industrial Resource Center (NWIRC), one of the centers that make up the Pennsylvania Manufacturing Extension Partnership, is helping launch student-run enterprises throughout northwest and north-central Pennsylvania. These enterprises connect industry with high schools and career and…
Christopher Dancy
Despite the important and ever-increasing role of artificial intelligence in many parts of modern society, there is very little policy or regulation governing the development and use of AI systems in the United States. Tech companies have largely been left to regulate themselves in this arena,…
Scott Ginsberg
Twenty years ago, digital tools were “a thing.” Now they flow through all things.
To some degree, every manufacturer is now a digital company. And with the right modern platform, any manufacturing organization can break down silos of ownership to focus on the intersection of people, processes, and…
Zach Winn
When it comes to battery innovations, much attention gets paid to potential new chemistries and materials. Often overlooked is the importance of production processes for bringing down costs.
Now the MIT spinout 24M Technologies has simplified lithium-ion battery production with a new design that…
NIST
An improvement to a Nobel Prize-winning technology called a frequency comb enables it to measure light pulse arrival times with greater sensitivity than previously possible—potentially improving measurements of distance along with applications such as precision timing and atmospheric sensing.
The…
Anne Trafton
Taking advantage of a phenomenon known as emergent behavior in the microscale, MIT engineers have designed simple microparticles that can collectively generate complex behavior, much the same way that a colony of ants can dig tunnels or collect food.
Working together, the microparticles can…
Bruno Ménard
While traditional image processing software relies on task-specific algorithms, deep learning software uses a network to implement user-trained algorithms to recognize good and bad images or regions.
Fortunately, the advent of specialized algorithms and graphical user interface (GUI) tools for…
S. Heather Duncan
A new deep-learning framework developed at the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is speeding up the process of inspecting additively manufactured metal parts using X-ray computed tomography, or CT, while increasing the accuracy of the results. The reduced costs for time, labor,…
William A. Levinson
‘You see, but you do not observe,” Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1891) A Scandal in Bohemia. Taiichi Ohno, who developed Henry Ford’s lean production system into the Toyota Production System, told managers to stand in a circle on the shop floor and observe everything…
Gleb Tsipursky
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink claimed in a recent interview with Fox that “we have to get our employees back in the office.” According to him, doing so would result in “rising productivity that will offset some of the inflationary pressures.”
Fink didn’t provide any data in the form of statistics,…
Kerry Stevenson
Operating a desktop FFF 3D printer can be a ton of fun, except when you make mistakes. Mistakes can cause print failures, and also embarrassment when they are so obvious you really should not have made them.
Let’s take a look at my list of the eight dumbest FFF 3D printing mistakes you can make.…
Matthew Inniger
The inability to gather good data has challenged many food manufacturers for decades. But not anymore. As sensor technology has improved, and technology platforms have become more accessible and affordable to small and medium-sized manufacturers, the food industry is poised for transformation. Food…
James Gaines, Knowable Magazine
In 2004, the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) dangled a $1 million prize for any group that could design an autonomous car that could drive itself through 142 miles of rough terrain from Barstow, California, to Primm, Nevada. Thirteen years later, the U.S. Department…
