As the nation’s leading scientific resource for oil spills, NOAA has been on the scene of the BP spill from the start, providing coordinated scientific weather and biological response services to federal, state and local organizations.  We have mobilized experts from across the agency to help contain the spreading oil spill and protect the Gulf [...]

EndNote Web Workshop UAB Sterne Library Computer Classroom Second Floor, Room 242 Monday, July 12, 3:30pm to 4:30pm & 5:00pm to 6:00pm Tuesday, July 13, 9:30am to 10:30am & 11:00am to 12:00pm Wednesday, July 14, 2:30pm to 3:30pm & 4:00pm to 5:00pm EndNote Web is a citation manager designed to help users collect, organize, and [...]

Networked PCs are increasingly being left on 24/7 to allow for off-hours access by employees, says Yuvraj Agarwal, at the University of California, San Diego.  “The administrator may want to do a backup, or the user may want to be able to connect into it,” he says.  But most of the time these PCs remain [...]

Programmable matter is a material whose properties can be programmed to achieve specific shapes or stiffnesses upon command.  This concept requires constituent elements to interact and rearrange intelligently in order to meet the goal.  This paper considers achieving programmable sheets that can form themselves in different shapes autonomously by folding.  Past approaches to creating transforming [...]

Self-assembly methods combined with standard top-down approaches are demonstrated to be suitable for fabricating three-dimensional ultracompact hybrid organic/inorganic electronic devices based on rolled-up nanomembranes. Capacitors that are self-wound and manufactured in parallel are almost 2 orders of magnitude smaller than their planar counterparts and exhibit capacitances per footprint area of around 200 μF/cm2. This value [...]

Here, we describe a biomimetic microsystem that reconstitutes the critical functional alveolar-capillary interface of the human lung.  This bioinspired microdevice reproduces complex integrated organ-level responses to bacteria and inflammatory cytokines introduced into the alveolar space.  In nanotoxicology studies, this lung mimic revealed that cyclic mechanical strain accentuates toxic and inflammatory responses of the lung to [...]

In mechatronic system design, we integrate. From the very start of the design process, we combine the physical system with sensors, actuators, computer control and human interfaces to give it some intelligence and decision-making capability.  At its very heart, system complexity is synonymous with power.  However, this power can be good or bad.  If the [...]

A newly created and first-of-its-kind graduate-level track of study from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Engineering will educate engineers and safety, health, and environmental professionals across industries in the best practices to prevent expansive disasters like the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and Upper Big Branch Mine explosion [...]

As a component of the Hewlett-Packard (HP) Global Social Innovation program in education, the HP Catalyst Initiative seeks to build a global network of consortia to develop more effective approaches to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.  In 2010, the Catalyst Initiative will fund up to five international consortia, each of which will explore [...]

The Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems (IIS) supports research and education projects that develop new knowledge in three core programs: (1) the Human-Centered Computing program; (2) the Information Integration and Informatics program; and (3) the Robust Intelligence program.  IIS is also responsible for managing the review [...]