Advanced Invention

Swifter suits, shoes that lean and gaming the pistol are just the beginning of the tech innovations giving track the runaround this summer

Every four years, we watch. We marvel at badminton, wonder about the modern decathlon and proudly pause for synchronized swimming. With more than 300 gold medals awarded across 37 disciplines, the next two weeks of our lives should be impressively unproductive. To aid in your immersion, we continue with our new series: “know your Olympic sport.” It’s part reminder that people actually get medals for this stuff (see: trampoline gymnastics) and part introduction to the science behind the sports.

Engineers have created a tiny motorized positioning device that has twice the dexterity of similar devices being developed for applications that include biological sensors and more compact, powerful computer hard drives.

This illustration depicts a tiny device called a monolithic comb drive, which might be used as a high-precision “nanopositioner” for such uses as biological sensors, computer hard drives and other possible applications. The device was created by Jason Vaughn Clark, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering at Purdue University. Credit: Birck Nanotechnology Center, Purdue University

The device, called a monolithic comb drive, might be used as a “nanoscale manipulator” that precisely moves or senses movement and forces. The devices also can be used in watery environments for probing biological molecules, said Jason Vaughn Clark, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and mechanical engineering, who created the design.

The Pentagon investigates the use of a new type of airless tire designed to get troop-carrying Humvees through hot spots without stopping

In Iraq and elsewhere, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) pack a double-deadly whammy: They can kill when they explode, and then they turn surviving soldiers into sitting ducks when Humvee tires blow out. Conventional Humvee tires need a certain amount of air pressure, but also may include so-called “run-flat” inserts that wrap around the tire’s rim to keep it from going completely flat when the tire’s surface is ruptured. The U.S. Army, however, is looking for an alternative that can keep its vehicles running faster and farther than a run-flat donut after an attack.

A recurrence of the 1859 solar superstorm would be a cosmic Katrina, causing billions of dollars of damage to satellites, power grids and radio communications

• The solar superstorm of 1859 was the fiercest ever recorded. Auroras filled the sky as far south as the Caribbean, magnetic compasses went haywire and telegraph systems failed.
• Ice cores suggest that such a blast of solar particles happens only once every 500 years, but even the storms every 50 years could fry satellites, jam radios and cause coast-to-coast blackouts.
• The cost of such an event justifies more systematic solar monitoring and beefier protection for satellites and the power grid.

As night was falling across the Americas on Sunday, August 28, 1859, the phantom shapes of the auroras could already be seen overhead. From Maine to the tip of Florida, vivid curtains of light took the skies. Startled Cubans saw the auroras directly overhead; ships’ logs near the equator described crimson lights reaching halfway to the zenith. Many people thought their cities had caught fire. Scientific instruments around the world, patiently recording minute changes in Earth’s magnetism, suddenly shot off scale, and spurious electric currents surged into the world’s telegraph systems. In Baltimore telegraph operators labored from 8 p.m. until 10 a.m. the next day to transmit a mere 400-word press report.

TOKYO (AFP) - Japanese researchers say they have developed a rubber that is able to conduct electricity well, paving the way for robots with stretchable “e-skin” that can feel heat and pressure like humans.

The material is the first in the world to solve the problems faced by metals — which are conductive but do not stretch — and rubber, which hardly transmits electricity, according to the team at the University of Tokyo.

The new technology is flexible like ordinary rubber but boasts conductivity some 570 times as high as commercially available rubbers filled with carbon particles, said the team led by Takao Someya at the university’s School of Engineering.