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"The orbiter is a completely different vehicle than anything that has ever flown in space." It was a work platform, a spacewalk platform, a construction site with a robotic arm, a laboratory, a people mover. It was a complex vehicle operating at the edge of its performance, with very little margin for error," John Shannon, program manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston told Air & Space magazine in March.

Austrian and German researchers at the University of Vienna and Technische Universitaet Muenchen have solved a long-standing problem in the design of mechanical resonators: the numerical prediction of the design-limited damping. They report their achievement, which has a broad impact on diverse fields, in the forthcoming issue of Nature Communications.