A massive ‘hit-and-run’ collision profoundly impacted the evolutionary history of Vesta, the brightest asteroid visible from Earth. This finding, by a team of researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research and ETH Zurich, Switzerland, deepens our understanding of protoplanet formation more than 4.5 billion years ago, in the early infancy…
‘Listening’ Drone Helps Find Victims Needing Rescue In Disasters
“Robot audition” is a research area that was proposed by Adjunct Professor Kazuhiro Nakadai of Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and Professor Hiroshi G. Okuno of Waseda University in 2000. Until then, robots had not been able to recognize voices unless a microphone was near a person’s mouth. Development of “robot ears” began advancing…
One-Nanometer Trimetallic Alloy Particles Created
Background The principal component of petroleum and natural gas are hydrocarbons and their mixtures, which are indispensable as resources supporting modern infrastructure as raw materials for the petrochemical industry. A technique which has been conventionally used to create beneficial chemical products from hydrocarbons was to use a large amount of metallic peroxides in hazardous organic…
Ultra-High-Speed Optical Fiber Sensor Enables Detection of Structural Damage in Real Time
Aging degradation and seismic damage of civil infrastructure pose a serious problem for society. One promising technology for monitoring the condition of structures is optical fiber sensing. By embedding long optical fibers into a structure, strain and temperature distributions along the fibers can be detected. Among the various types of optical fiber sensors, distributed strain…