Multifunctional materials are emerging as a new interdisciplinary field.

In the future, new functional and reduced-scale materials that are currently in the forefront of technology will be hybridized into designer materials that can perform dramatic “tailorable” functions in large ...

Editor’s Note

Every year, NAE sponsors a Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) Symposium, which brings together some 100 outstanding, competitively selected, young (ages 30–45) engineering leaders from academia, industry, and government laboratories for three days of sharing ideas and ...

Each generation of landing technology addresses the challenges posed by the previous generation.

People have been fascinated with the idea of exploring Mars since the very beginning of the space age. Largely because of the belief that some form of life may have existed there at one time, ...

Sound is inherently a spatial perception.

The compact disc format, which records audio with 16-bit resolution at a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, was engineered to reproduce audio with fidelity exceeding the limits of human perception. And it works. However, sound is inherently a spatial ...

From a model-building perspective, the goal is to “make things as simple as possible, but no simpler.”

The advent of computers ushered in a new way of doing science and engineering in which a host of complex problems ranging from weather prediction to the microstructural evolution of ...

Someday we may be able to make a photoreal computer model of anything—no matter what it is made of or how it reflects light.

Anyone who has seen a recent summer blockbuster has seen the results of dramatic improvements in the realism of computer-generated graphics. Visual-effects ...

Low-cost mobile robots can advance scientific research on the Arctic plateau.

The Antarctic plateau is a unique location to study the upper atmosphere at high magnetic latitudes because it provides a stable environment for sensitive instruments that measure interactions between the solar wind ...