Brian Shrader

Basements can be a scary place for kids, but at Research Triangle High School in Durham, the “Terrorbytes” are using the space to design, build and operate robots. Each year, the group builds a robot to meet specific challenges in competitions. “Last year’s robot was designed to cross obstacles called defenses and, in addition, shoot large dodgeballs into a high goal,” Kaiz Akhtar, a team captain, said. As cool as last year’s robot is, this year’s is bigger and even better. The team competes in a league called FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), which is...

About six years ago, the City of Raleigh replaced old-fashioned parking meters with electronic pay stations that take credit cards. Credit card payments now account for more than half of parking transactions in the city. Now, city officials have another plan to make paying for parking even easier, and they’ll be rolling out a pilot program this fall in several locations. Passport Parking is a Charlotte-based app that allows drivers to pay from their mobile devices. No credit cards, no remembering space numbers, no fiddling with coins – for those still do it. Passport Parking launched as a company...

Students at North Carolina State University are accustomed to dealing with long trips between buildings – the bus trip from Hunt Library, on Centennial Campus, and D.H. Hill Library, on main campus, can take up to 20 minutes. A research team at the college is busy working on a futuristic way to move thousands of people a day along that route in just a few minutes. Developers say the “Econ PRT,” a personal rapid transit system, could be the start of something big. “It will be like stepping into the Jetsons,” Marshall Brain, director of the university’s Engineering Entrepreneurs...

From driving directions to managing calendars, people rely on smartphones to make life easier. Two recent graduates of North Carolina State University are hoping their technology could help smokers kick the habit. Nicotrax, a smart-case and mobile app combo that tracks cigarette use patterns, counts cravings and identifies urge-triggering locations, launched on Aug. 3. Suraaj Doshi and Kyle Linton, the designers, hope to raise $50,000 on Indiegogo to support the technology. “Whenever somebody removes a cigarette, it pings the smartphone app and collects all the different data,” Doshi said. “We can track when they smoke, where they smoke and...

Google recently announced Project Fi, a lower-cost wireless service that allows a cellphone to look for a Wi-Fi connection before sending the call through a more expensive cell-tower connection. The idea got a lot of attention, but a Raleigh company says it’s been doing the same thing for four years. Republic Wireless, based at North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus, launched in 2011, bringing the WiFi-first concept to cellular customers. “The phone automatically uses Wi-Fi to send calls and messages, and when they’re outside of Wi-Fi, it automatically switches to the cell network,” said Jon Schniepp, senior vice president...

​Flying through the sky next to the roaring engines of an airplane can be loud. But passengers may get some relief inside the cabin, thanks to a discovery from a North Carolina State University assistant professor. Yun Jing, with the school’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, said a composite material with a honeycomb design is great to use in the floor and ceiling of an airplane cabin because it’s strong and lightweight. But that design also allows a lot of engine noise to get into the cabin. Jing and a team of researchers at NCSU and the Massachusetts...

Last year, in the Shell Eco-Marathon competition in Houston, a team from Duke University took second place. This year, they hope to better their showing in the global competition where students design, build and test energy-efficient vehicles. The goal: To travel the farthest distance using the least amount of energy. The especially galling part? “We always lose to this team called Mater Dei, a high school,” said Duke junior Charlie Kritzmacher. Kritzmacher, a mechanical engineering major, is leading a team of about 30 students in this year’s competition. They’ll head to Detroit next month with a newly designed car....