Concrete Plans: Modern life is taking its toll on an ancient bulwark of strength: concrete. The Egyptian pyramids and the Roman coliseum are still standing, their concrete holding fast after thousands of years of weathering. But modern concrete structures can fail after only 20 years. The difference? Modern structures are forced to withstand a lot more use, bear a lot more weight, and must cope with more intense, strength-withering pollutants. (more)
 

Real World, Real Time: When you’re trying to pilot 14-ton, $43 million fighter jet through a hailstorm of enemy fire, you just don’t want to deal with little technological glitches like a computer system freeze-up or a circuit-busy signal. (more)
 

Fast Times: It isn’t easy keeping a flame going in a 4,000-mile-an-hour wind. And that’s just one problem with aircraft propulsion at super-fast speeds. If you want hypersonic flight—and who wouldn’t want to travel to any place on the globe within 2-3 hours?—you’d better get the mix just right: Chemical kinetics, pressure, mixing rate, temperature and stream velocity are just some of the factors affecting combustion at extremely high speeds. (more)
 

Virtually Real: Clare McCabe is bringing the virtual world of molecular modeling into tighter register with the actual nano-world of real-life molecules. She’s interested in how molecules operate at the nanoscale, because that’s an area where neither classical theory nor quantum mechanics are sufficiently predictive. (more)
 

Thinking Inside the Voxel: *Mark Does is interested in what’s /really/ going on inside that 1 millimeter cube of MRI space called a “voxel.” A voxel is like a 3-D pixel in a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scan and is the smallest spatial unit an MRI scanner is able to resolve. (more)