Engineering Update

Learning in 140-Character Bites

Craig Beard — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:17:38 +0000

In most respects, Prof. Natasha Neogi’s aerospace engineering class is like any other. It’s a large, hour-long lecture-style course at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. But at the halfway mark, Neogi’s class takes on a new twist. She invites her students to log on to Twitter — the “micro-blogging” service that limits messages to 140 characters — and write in with questions. Neogi sifts through the “tweets,” in Twitter-speak, addressing the most common sticking point at the end of class. Once widely dismissed as an instrument of vanity, Twitter is now showing up in serious places. Its citizen-journalistic role after last June’s Iranian election was much celebrated; in May, a NASA astronaut became the first to tweet from space. Bit by bit, Twitter is finding a role in education. [ASEE Connections, November 2009]

Robot Rides Shotgun to Make Us Happier Drivers

Craig Beard — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:39:37 +0000

Audi and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology envision a future where robots riding shotgun make us happier, safer drivers and create a “symbiotic relationship” between car and driver. The Affective Intelligent Driving Agent, Aida, would analyze our driving habits, keeping track of frequent routes and destinations to provide real-time traffic info, and make friendly suggestions along the way. It also could give gentle reminders to buckle up, watch our speed, or slow down for that school bus up ahead. The idea is to change how we interact with our vehicles and the ever-increasing amount of information we have to process while driving. [Wired.com, 17 Nov 2009]

Scientists Model Cat’s Brain with Supercomputer

Craig Beard — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:18:00 +0000

Even the world’s most powerful supercomputers can’t replicate basic aspects of the human mind. The machines can’t imagine a wall painted a different color, for instance, or picture a person’s face and connect that to an emotion. If researchers can make computers operate more like a brain thinks — by reasoning and dealing with abstractions, among other things — they could unleash tremendous insights in such diverse fields as medicine and economics. A computer with the power of a human brain is not yet near. But researchers from IBM report that they’ve simulated a cat’s cerebral cortex, the thinking part of the brain, using a massive supercomputer. [ChicagoTribune.com, 17 Nov 2009]

Club Aims to Build Girls into Engineers

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:36:27 +0000

Last week, Karin Hill, the director of education and public programs for the National Museum of the United States Navy in the District, visited Calvert Middle School in Prince Frederick. Her mission: to teach the members of the school’s all-girls engineering club — which is the first of its kind in a Calvert County school — how to make a barometer out of a soup can, a balloon, a sewing needle and a straw. The program was just one of several events the club has presented this school year. The club was launched as part of a school system initiative to get students interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. [WashingtonPost.com, 12 Nov 2009]

Carbon Nanotube Sponges

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:29:48 +0000

Scientists have invented a carbon-based sponge that can soak up organic pollutants, such as oils and solvents, from the surface of water. No water is absorbed and the sponge can then be wrung out and reused, like an ordinary household sponge. Absorbing up to 180 times its own weight in organic matter, the sponge is light and tough and has the potential to dramatically enhance oil spill cleanup. [MaterialsViews, 6 Nov 2009]

Superconductors to Wire a Smarter Grid

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:25:33 +0000

A proposed hub for connecting the three independent electricity grids that span the continental United States could make it easier to ramp up production of renewable electricity. The project, called the Tres Amigas Superstation, would use superconducting “pipelines” and converter stations to connect three grids: the Western, Eastern, and Texas Interconnections. Connections between the grids have been limited because the grids aren’t synchronized — the AC power is out of phase. Special stations that convert AC power into DC power and then back into AC power in the correct phase are needed to move power from one grid to another. [TechnologyReview.com, 12 Nov 2009]

With Road Trains, Highways Become Public Transportation

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:19:21 +0000

Researchers in the European Union are using telematics to create “road trains” that join the benefits of carpooling with the freedom of driving alone. The latest concept, part of the EU’s Safe Road Trains for the Environment initiative, groups cars with similar destinations into road trains over long stretches of highway. The lead vehicle will be driven by an experienced motorist — it may even be a bus that regularly travels the route — while the functions of each following vehicle will be automatically controlled and tethered to the actions of the lead car so that individual drivers can hammer out e-mails or eat breakfast. [Wired.com, 10 Nov 2009]

Biodegradable Electronics Dissolve after Use

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:10:10 +0000

Along with the usual mix of teabags, banana skins, and egg shells, compost bins of the future could contain biodegradable electronic circuits, according to researchers in the U.S. The electronic components could also be made biocompatible, so they could be implanted into the body for a short period of time before being broken down and absorbed without the need for a second operation to remove the implant. Such devices could include electronically activated drug-release systems or temporary biosensors, for example. [Chemistry World, 10 Nov 2009]

Contact Lenses That Respond to Light

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:06:30 +0000

Transition lenses–which darken automatically in response to bright sunlight–have been available for eyeglasses for 40 years. But adapting this flexibility to contact lenses has proven challenging. Now researchers in Singapore have developed UV-responsive, or photochromic, lenses that darken when exposed to ultraviolet light, protecting the eyes against the sun’s damaging rays, and return to normal in UV’s absence. [TechnologyReview.com, 10 Nov 2009]

Brain-Like Chip May Solve Computers’ Energy Problem

Craig Beard — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:03:45 +0000

Kwabena Boahen’s love affair with digital computers began and ended in 1981, when he was 16. Boahen lived outside the city of Accra in the West African nation of Ghana. One afternoon Boahen’s father rolled down the driveway with a surprise in the trunk of his Peugeot: a RadioShack TRS-80 — the family’s first computer. Young Boahen parked the machine at a desk on the porch, plugged the computer into a TV set to provide a screen and a cassette recorder so he could store programs on tapes, and soon he was programming it to play Ping-Pong. But as he read about the electronics that made it and all other digital computers work, he soured on the toy. Moving the Ping-Pong ball just one pixel across the screen required thousands of 1s and 0s, generated by transistors in the computer’s processor that were switching open and shut 2.5 million times per second. Boahen had expected to find elegance at the heart of his new computer. Instead he found a Lilliputian bureaucracy of binary code. “I was totally disgusted,” he recalls. “It was so brute force.” That disillusionment inspired a dream of a better solution, a vision that would eventually guide his career. Boahen has since crossed the Atlantic Ocean and become a prominent scientist at Stanford University, where he is working to create a computer that will fulfill his boyhood vision — a new kind of computer, based not on the regimented order of traditional silicon chips but on the organized chaos of the human brain. [Discover, October 2009]