Category Archives: Students

Items for students and others, interested in learning about science and engineering and the application of science in our lives. We post many of the general interest items here.

Using IT to Improve Construction

Teicholz awarded top construction engineering prize:

One of CIFE’s biggest innovations is a program that visualizes the various stages of a construction project over time using 3-D models, like a digital movie. The models, which integrate hundreds of building components in an understandable way, can be shared early in the design stage and can straightforwardly communicate a complex schedule to everyone, Teicholz says. “Better decisions can be made about every aspect of the design rather than trying to improve the design after everyone has completed their work,” he says.

The need to correct mistakes after the fact is seen all too often in construction projects, says Martin Fischer, professor of civil and environmental engineering and current CIFE director. Walls built prematurely might have to be torn down, for example, or two work crews that did not communicate might plan to be in the same place at the same time. Time, labor and materials are wasted, and the final cost of the project increases.

Cost of Powering Your PC

The cost of leaving your PC on

Have you ever wondered how much it’s costing you to leave a computer on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week?
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Here’s the kilowatt-hour calculation for my server, which draws ~160 watts: 160 watts * (8,760 hours per year) / 1000 = 1401.6 kilowatt-hours

The other thing you’ll need to know is how much you’re paying for power in your area. Power here in California is rather expensive and calculated using a byzantine rate structure. According to this recent Mercury News article, the household average for our area is 14.28 cents per kilowatt-hour. 1401.6 kilowatt-hours * 14.28 cents / 100 = $200.15 So leaving my server on is costing me $200 / year, or $16.68 per month. My home theater PC is a bit more frugal at 65 watts. Using the same formulas, that costs me $81 / year or $6.75 per month.

Power could cost more than servers, Google warns: “A Google engineer has warned that if the performance per watt of today’s computers doesn’t improve, the electrical costs of running them could end up far greater than the initial hardware price tag.”

Trash + Plasma = Electricity

The Prophet of Garbage (broken link removed):

Startech’s trash converter uses superheated plasma to reduce garbage to its molecular components.
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Perhaps the most amazing part of the process is that it’s self-sustaining. Just like your toaster, Startech’s Plasma Converter draws its power from the electrical grid to get started. The initial voltage is about equal to the zap from a police stun gun. But once the cycle is under way, the 2,200ËšF syngas is fed into a cooling system, generating steam that drives turbines to produce electricity. About two thirds of the power is siphoned off to run the converter; the rest can be used on-site for heating or electricity, or sold back to the utility grid.
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Over the past decade, half a dozen companies have been developing plasma technology to turn garbage into energy. “The best renewable energy is the one we complain about the most: municipal solid waste,” says Louis Circeo, the director of plasma research at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It will prove cheaper to take garbage to a plasma plant than it is to dump it on a landfill.” A Startech machine that costs roughly $250 million could handle 2,000 tons of waste daily, approximately what a city of a million people amasses in that time span.

Related: Turning Trash into Electricity

Broken link http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/873aae7bf86c0110vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html

Cool Falkirk Wheel Canal Lift

Falkirk Wheel:

The wheel, which has an overall diameter of 35 metres, consists of two opposing arms which extend 15 metres beyond the central axle, and which take the shape of a Celtic-inspired, double-headed axe. Two sets of these axe-shaped arms are attached about 25 metres apart to a 3.5 metre diameter axle. Two diametrically opposed water-filled caissons, each with a capacity of 80,000 gallons (302 tons), are fitted between the ends of the arms.

These caissons always weigh the same whether or not they are carrying their combined capacity of 600 tonnes of floating canal barges as, according to Archimedes’ principle, floating objects displace their own weight in water, so when the boat enters, the amount of water leaving the caisson has exactly the same as the boat. This keeps the wheel balanced and so, despite its enormous mass, it rotates through 180Â° in less than four minutes while using very little power. It takes just 22.5 kilowatts (kW) to power the electric motors, which consume just 1.5 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy in four minutes, roughly the same as boiling eight kettles of water.

Pretty cool – follow link for more info and larger image. Less cool canal photos: Monocacy Aqueduct in Maryland, USA,here is the aqueduct (in this case, a bridge that is an carries a water for a canal).

Article on Sergey Brin

The Story of Sergey Brin by Mark Malseed:

In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before Sergey’s 17th birthday, Michael led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family along, despite uneasiness about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to visit family members still living in Moscow, including Sergey’s paternal grandfather, like Michael, a Ph.D. mathematician.
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When he won a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school, he insisted on Stanford. (M.I.T. had rejected him.) Aside from the physical beauty of Stanford’s campus, Sergey knew the school’s reputation for supporting high-tech entrepreneurs. At the time, though, his focus was squarely on getting his doctorate.

He provides another example of someone born outside the USA providing great benefit to the US. The United States has done very well allowing others to flourish here.

Shouldn’t Google Toolbar spell check have Sergey and Brin as words?

Undersea Restaurant

Take a vacation and visit this cool engineering project: Hilton Maldives Resort & Spa Rangali Island (they broke link so I removed it).

More Lego Learning

Let Go of My Legos:

The eighth-grade Physics by Design class at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, Mass., has a reputation for being downright fun. But most students don’t refer to it by its conventional title, they just call it Lego. That’s right. Lego. You won’t find students here nodding off to sterile terms in a textbook; instead, they’re elbow-deep in bins of colorful plastic bricks building cars and movable robotic arms. And because they’re learning to program whatever they build with the help of Robolab software and a microcomputer embedded in a Lego brick, they really understand the meaning of torque, velocity and momentum.

Having fun is good, but the real key is creating environments where learning is fun, as is the case here. I believe people naturally learn and the largely learn to suppress that desire when subjected to bad formal education as they learn to equate learning with bad experiences.

Bionanotechnology Future

Commercialization and Future Developments in Bionanotechnology by Marcel P. Bruchez:

The lack of specifiability of our modules was a key challenge to commercialization. Specification will require detailed basic investigations of the properties and chemistry of nanoparticle materials in biological systems. In addition, we will have to establish analytical tools and quantitative descriptors to detail the distribution of properties present in a population of nanoparticles. This is categorically different from specification for organic molecules and proteins, in which properties can be effectively described by an average. In nanomaterials, performance properties may be dominated by a relatively small population of particles, so averaging cannot always be used.

Interesting paper, from The Bridge, an open-access publication of the National Academy of Engineering. This issue includes papers from the 12th U.S. Frontiers of Engineering including: New Mobility: The Next Generation of Sustainable Urban Transportation and Creating Intelligent Agents in Games.

Catnap Benefits

The health benefits of 40 winks

A six-year Greek study has just concluded that people who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.

Too tired to work? Then have a snooze:

The state-backed siesta is part of a â‚¬7 million (Â£4.7 million) campaign begun yesterday by the Health Ministry to encourage the French to sleep more and better. A third of the population does not sleep enough, experts say. Tiredness is blamed for 20 per cent of road and domestic accidents, and for low efficiency at work and school, obesity, depression and many other ills.

A nap a day keeps lost productivity at bay

According to a Cornell University study, sleep-deprived workers cost U.S. industry $150 billion a year in reduced job productivity and fatigue-related accidents.

The Avocado

I bought an avocado a the supermarket yesterday. While eating some today I decided to search the internet for some nutritional information. That info wasn’t that interesting to me, but I did find this interesting: the avocado fruit does not ripen on the tree. When it is harvested it will ripen. If the fruit is picked once it reaches maturity, and will then ripen in a few days. This can be speed up by putting the avocado in a paper bag and speed up more if other fruit such as bananas are included, because of the influence of ethylene gas.

Feeding avocados to any non-human animal should be avoided completely. There is documented evidence that animals such as cattle, horses, goats, rabbits, birds, dogs, cats, and even fish can be severely harmed or even killed when they consume the leaves, bark, or fruit. Avocados contain a toxic fatty acid derivative known as persin. Many animal organizations recommend total avoidance of all parts of the plant.

Anyway I found the information interesting 🙂 Related: Bannanas Going Going Gone – Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. – Drinking Soda and Obesity