Applied Physics Laboratory
University-affiliated research center
Follow Applied Physics Laboratory on Notably News to receive short updates to your email — rarely!
| 2023 | APL researchers developed a wearable thin-film thermoelectric cooler (TFTEC), one of the world's smallest and fastest refrigeration devices, which helps amputees perceive temperature sensations in phantom limbs. The technology was recognized with an R&D 100 award. |
| 2022 | APL celebrated its 80th anniversary, highlighting its extensive portfolio of hundreds of projects across 12 mission areas, focusing on complex research and engineering challenges for the United States. |
| 2022 | APL hired its first full-time sustainability manager, signaling a commitment to environmental and sustainable practices at the research facility. |
| September 2022 | The DART mission successfully struck the smaller body of a binary asteroid system, demonstrating a groundbreaking planetary defense strategy. |
| 2021 | APL opened Building 201, an interdisciplinary research center spanning 263,000 square feet, featuring a 200-person auditorium, over 90,000 square feet of specialized laboratory space, a four-story atrium, STEM Center, and 100 meeting rooms. |
| November 2021 | APL launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, NASA's first planetary defense mission designed to test asteroid deflection techniques. |
| 2019 | APL's Dragonfly mission was selected as the fourth NASA New Frontiers mission, proposing an X8 octocopter lander to explore Saturn's moon Titan. |
| 2016 | APL demonstrated breakthrough prosthetic technology by enabling a paralyzed man to 'fist-bump' President Barack Obama using signals from an implanted brain chip, with the limb providing sensory feedback to the wearer's brain. |
| 2014 | APL successfully demonstrated the Modular Prosthetic Limb, a fully artificial articulated arm and hand operated by a bilateral shoulder-level amputee using pattern recognition algorithms to track muscle contractions and enable precise prosthetic movement. |
This contents of the box above is based on material from the Wikipedia article Applied Physics Laboratory, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.