Engineering

Disasters at sea trigger ship-safety advances

When one of the world's largest container ships crashed into the bank of the Suez Canal in 2021, a major gateway for global trade became blocked with an estimated $9.6 billion in daily commerce being held up.

Engineering

When sticky becomes unsticky—the invention of reversible glue

Newcastle University engineers have invented a new glue that promises to change how we recycle. Its reversible nature means it can be used for a multitude of purposes such as on the labels of bottles so that they are efficiently ...

Engineering

Concrete versus asphalt for Nigeria's roads: which is better?

Nigeria's new works minister, David Umahi, is pushing for the use of rigid pavement in road construction, as against the flexible pavement predominantly in use. This, as the minister noted, is due to the precarious state ...

Electronics & Semiconductors

Preventing catastrophic failure in lithium ion batteries

In a recent study published in Advanced Energy Materials, a team of ANSTO scientists, led by Prof. Vanessa Peterson, used neutron scattering techniques to understand the formation of harmful lithium structures in rechargeable ...

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Surface

In mathematics, specifically in topology, a surface is a two-dimensional topological manifold. The most familiar examples are those that arise as the boundaries of solid objects in ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space R3 — for example, the surface of a ball or bagel. On the other hand, there are surfaces which cannot be embedded in three-dimensional Euclidean space without introducing singularities or intersecting itself — these are the unorientable surfaces.

To say that a surface is "two-dimensional" means that, about each point, there is a coordinate patch on which a two-dimensional coordinate system is defined. For example, the surface of the Earth is (ideally) a two-dimensional sphere, and latitude and longitude provide coordinates on it — except at the International Date Line and the poles, where longitude is undefined. This example illustrates that not all surfaces admits a single coordinate patch. In general, multiple coordinate patches are needed to cover a surface.

Surfaces find application in physics, engineering, computer graphics, and many other disciplines, primarily when they represent the surfaces of physical objects. For example, in analyzing the aerodynamic properties of an airplane, the central consideration is the flow of air along its surface.

This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA