When you choose a sensor for a project, you're also establishing a relationship with an expert organization and its key people. Your vendor will help you and your organization get the most from its sensor. If you buy from a catalog or base your purchase decision solely on price, you'll miss the added benefits a sensor partner brings to your operations.

In late 2006, NASA acquired a Predator B unmanned aerial system for civilian earth science and to test out new aeronautical technologies. And since then, Ikhana has been hard at work collecting atmospheric data and providing real-time fire imaging and mapping. Its current task is to help evaluate a new system to sense wing shape and structural load.

This month, pressure sensing contact lenses, 3D nanostructures in magnetic materials, a robot for pipeline checking, and pocket-sized nuclear magnetic resonance imaging.

As of Wednesday, the Midwest was getting another dose of deeply unwelcome rain to add to its current surfeit. While Missouri braces itself for yet more trouble, Iowa has at least been able to start its cleanup. One thing is certain, however: this isn't going to be the last flood the region experiences, nor will it be the worst. Mother Nature isn't that kind.

Proximity sensors play a major role in the automotive industry because they're used extensively to position components accurately for welding and assembly. This is true of other forms of discrete manufacturing. So it behooves sensor vendors to design devices that can withstand the harshest environments and the greatest threats to optimal sensor performance. Here's one approach.

Another year means another crop of surprising, clever, and highly capable new products entering the sensors marketplace. For the judges of the Best of Sensors Expo Award that means sifting through the many wonderful entrants to select those products that we think stand out from the crowd in terms of their uniqueness, utility, and potential to change the way people work. Read on to learn who won and why.

This month, printed blast dosimeters, a new magnetic sensor, a biosensor that could be mass-produced, and a kayak that can be operated by a quadriplegic.

Unless you are dead to all finer emotion, the picture of NASA's Phoenix lander gently descending toward the surface of Mars made you feel something. But the (so far) successful mission is ground-breaking in several other ways, beyond the sheer technological achievement of creating and transporting Phoenix to Mars, achieving a perfect landing, and having the complex machinery unpack and deploy successfully.

You've done the homework described in the article I wrote for Sensors titled "A Twelve-Step Sensor Selection Checklist". Now it's time to send your specification to the vendors you've chosen. You're probably working with your company's purchasing department, a process that has its pluses and minuses.

A Digital data acquisition/recording system is the fundamental component of almost every experiment performed today. The success of the experiment is entirely dependent on the capabilities of the system and it is almost universally assumed that it will provide the correct answer. Unfortunately, life is not so simple.