This summer, record-breaking heat waves in Europe led to extreme stress on the power system, with high evening electricity prices due to air-conditioning demand, insufficient battery storage and outages at thermal and nuclear power plants. Events such as these highlight the challenge of maintaining a reliable power supply during extreme weather.

AI is showing up in nearly every aspect of daily life—from internet searches to visits to the doctor's office. It could one day even play a role in the street layout in front of your apartment building.

A new formulation of CO2 foams could help address one of the energy industry's main challenges, specifically regarding the injection of CO2 underground: controlling CO2 mobility in reservoir porous media. This advancement has the potential to improve reservoir sweep, enhance oil recovery and increase geological CO2 retention.

Researchers at the Advanced Science Research Center at the CUNY Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) and Honeywell Aerospace have developed a new way to reduce the transfer of radiant heat between closely spaced bodies by using thin, nonmetallic coatings.

Anyone who has struggled with an arcade claw machine knows that controlling a mechanical arm is not as easy as it looks. Excavator operators face a much harder version of the same problem. They must coordinate several joystick movements to control the machine’s boom, arm, bucket and cab at the same time. Learning those controls […]

The post MIT’s New Excavator Controller Could Help Beginners Dig Like Experts appeared first on Knowridge Science Report.

Feeling too warm or too cold indoors may depend on more than the thermostat. The spectrum of indoor lighting plays a role in how people perceive temperature, according to research led by scientists at Penn State.

An electronic skin with a sensing system that can detect pressure and temperature could someday help amputees gain feeling in their prosthetics. The work, led by Washington State University researchers and published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science, can sense at a scale 10 times finer than current commercial glove sensors.

Anyone who's ever wrestled with a claw machine at an arcade can appreciate the difficulty of pulling and pushing joysticks in just the right way to get a mechanical arm to scoop up that one special toy. Coordinating the joysticks and connecting their movement to the claw's motion is a type of "mental mapping" that is not immediately intuitive. (And it's what arcade owners depend on to bring players back again and again.)