Category Physics

Engineers develop Novel Techniques to Trick Object Detection Systems

Many of today’s vehicles use object detection systems to help avoid collisions. SwRI engineers developed unique patterns that can trick these systems into seeing something else, seeing the objects in another location or not seeing the objects at all. In this photo, the object detection system sees a person rather than a vehicle. This research will allow engineers to thoroughly test object detection systems and improve the security of the deep-learning algorithms they use.
Credit: Southwest Research Institute

Project to test and improve deep-learning algorithms for enhanced security. New adversarial techniques developed by engineers at Southwest Research Institute can make objects “invisible” to image detection systems that use deep-learning algorithms...

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Improving 3D-printed Prosthetics and integrating Electronic Sensors

The mold of local teen Josie Fraticelli’s hand that was scanned during the development of a personalized prosthetic.
Credit: Photo by Logan Wallace. Virginia Tech

Scientists have made inroads in integrating electronic sensors with personalized 3D-printed prosthetics. With the growth of 3D printing, it’s entirely possible to 3D print your own prosthetic from models found in open-source databases. But those models lack personalized electronic user interfaces like those found in costly, state-of-the-art prosthetics.

Now, a Virginia Tech professor and his interdisciplinary team of undergraduate student researchers have made inroads in integrating electronic sensors with personalized 3D-printed prosthetics – a development that could one day lead to more affordable electric-powered prost...

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It’s a One-way Street for Sound Waves in this New Technology

In the image, a flexible membrane (gray square) serves as an acoustic resonator, placed between two mirrors. When laser light is trapped between the mirrors, it passes repeatedly through the membrane. The force exerted by the laser light is used to control the membrane’s vibrations.
Credit: Harris Lab/Yale University

Imagine being able to hear people whispering in the next room, while the raucous party in your own room is inaudible to the whisperers. Yale researchers have found a way to do just that – make sound flow in one direction – within a fundamental technology found in everything from cell phones to gravitational wave detectors.

What’s more, the researchers have used the same idea to control the flow of heat in one direction...

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Dark Matter is Not Made Up of Tiny Black Holes

The Milky Way galaxy (left) and the Andromeda galaxy (right) are separated by 2.6 million light years. Compared with the areas where stars are clustered together, dark matter is believed to be distributed over a much larger volume.
Credit: Kavli IPMU

An international team of researchers has put a theory speculated by the late Stephen Hawking to its most rigorous test to date, and their results have ruled out the possibility that primordial black holes smaller than a tenth of a millimeter make up most of dark matter. Details of their study have been published in this week’s Nature Astronomy.

Scientists know that 85% of the matter in the Universe is made up of dark matter. Its gravitational force prevents stars in our Milky Way from flying apart...

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