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.

Extreme Engineering

Discovery Channels’ Extreme Engineering explores audacious engineering possibilities. The Extreme Engineering web site (broken by phb organization that can’t even keep a web page alive forget actually doing amazing stuff, so I removed it) provides a view of some of the exciting projects engineers have worked on like the new subways for New York City and Hong Kong’s airport. And it also shows some possible future projects like a transatlantic tunnel (image above) which would float in the ocean and carry trains, pipelines…. Trains could run in a vacuum and travel at 6-8,000 kph (taking under an hour to travel from New York City to London. Of course there are quite a few engineering and economic factors to deal with to make something like that a reality.

Wind Power

Wind Power graph

Graph of wind power capacity in the USA from 1981 – 2005 (from 10 Megawatts to 9,149 megawatts).

From the American Wind Energy Association:

The only other countries around the world that have more wind power installed are Germany (19,140 MW as of the end of June), and Spain (10,728 MW).

AWEA expects the U.S. to pass the 15,000 MW mark by the end of 2007 and can have 25,000 MW installed by the end of 2010, with the proper policies in place. At this growth rate, the U.S. could have 100,000 MW installed by 2020, which would provide the nation with approximately 6% of its future power needs, about as much as hydropower provides today.

Nanocars

Nano Car image

‘Nanocar’ with buckyball wheels paves way for other molecular machines

“The synthesis and testing of nanocars and other molecular machines is providing critical insight in our investigations of bottom-up molecular manufacturing,” said one of the two lead researchers, James M. Tour, the Chao Professor of Chemistry, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and professor of computer science at Rice University. “We’d eventually like to move objects and do work in a controlled fashion on the molecular scale, and these vehicles are great test beds for that. They’re helping us learn the ground rules.”

The nanocar consists of a chassis and axles made of well-defined organic groups with pivoting suspension and freely rotating axles. The wheels are buckyballs, spheres of pure carbon containing 60 atoms apiece. The entire car measures just 3-4 nanometers across, making it slightly wider than a strand of DNA. A human hair, by comparison, is about 80,000 nanometers in diameter.

Automatic Cat Feeder

The Automatic Cat Feeder:

As I dug around this box, I found an old CD Rom drive and power supply. The thought struck me that I could use the ejecting tray of the CD Rom as a solenoid to push the trigger mechanism of some sort of physical contraption. But then I had a bootstrapping problem – what can I use to push the eject button of the CD Rom on schedule?

After some more thought, I realized that I could just use my spare (working) computer as the basis of the cat feeder. It’s also my home’s Subversion source control server – a rare mix of server workloads indeed! It has a CD Rom drive, so I could just use software to open and close it.

And water for the cat too:

Water flows out of the jug as long as the water level is below the hole at the bottom. When water flows out, the air pressure in jug decreases until it sucks in some air to equalize. When the water level covers the hole, though, the air pressure can no longer equalize, so the water flow stops.

When the cats drink the water level down a bit, the jug can once again equalize its air pressure, and lets more water out.

Don’t miss the video – Related: Engineering at Home

Electricity from Bacteria and Wastewater

Researchers harness the power of bacteria by Renee Meiller

In nature, says McMahon, photosynthetic bacteria effectively extract energy from their food — and microbial fuel cells capitalize on that efficiency. “By having the microbes strip the electrons out of the organic waste, and turning that into electricity, then we can make a process of conversion more efficient,” she says. “And they’re very good at doing that-much better than we are with our high-tech extraction methods.”

Through machinery such as plants, photosynthetic bacteria harvest solar energy. They also make products to power microbial fuel cells. “In many ways, this is the best of both worlds — generating electricity from a ‘free’ energy source like sunlight and removing wastes at the same time,” says Donohue. “The trick is to bring ideas from different disciplines to develop biorefineries and fuel cells that take advantage of the capabilities of photosynthetic bacteria.”

The benefit of using photosynthetic bacteria, he says, is that solar-powered microbial fuel cells can generate additional electricity when sunlight is available.

Giant Wasp Nests

Giant wasp nest

Giant nests perplex experts (site broke link so I removed it):

The largest nest Ray has inspected this year filled the interior of a weathered 1955 Chevrolet parked in a rural Elmore County barn. That nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago, but quickly spread to fill the entire vehicle, the property owner, Harry Coker, said. Four satellite nests around it have gotten into the eaves of the barn, about 300 yards from his home.

Super-size that nest!, July 21st:

The super-sized nests may contain as many as 100,000. One mammoth nest discovered in South Carolina contained roughly a quarter-million workers and as many as 100 queens.

Ray fears some of these nests may not even reach maximum size until late July or August.

One other finding has intrigued Ray and other researchers: the presence of satellite nests in close proximity to the large nest.

R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year

photo of Dean Kamen

R&D Magazine’s 2006 Innovator of the Year

Mega-inventor Dean Kamen has two simple goals: to improve children’s interest in science and technology, and to raise the standard of living for the world’s poor.

A self-taught physicist, with more than 150 patents, Kamen is obviously knowledgeable about what works in the world of science and technology.

Kamen’s latest endeavors involve bringing clean drinking water and cheap electricity to those who don’t have access to either. More than a billion people, or nearly 20% of the world’s population don’t have access to clean drinking water. And even more, 1.6 billion or about one out of every four people on this planet don’t have electricity. Continuing his emphasis on healthcare, Kamen points out that with clean water, you can eliminate more than 75% of those people’s health problems and diseases.

Prevoius post on Kamen’s work with electricity and drinking water for all. Kamen also founded FIRST (see previous post: 2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events).
Continue reading →

Voyager 1: Now 100 Times Further Away than the Sun

Voyager 1 Sails Past 100 AU by A.J.S. Rayl:

Voyager 1 logs yet another milestone in space history August 17 when it crosses an invisible boundary that marks 100 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun — about 15 billion kilometers (9.3 billion miles) out there — farther away than any human-made object has ever gone in space. It’s headed now for interstellar space. Voyager 2, at 80 AU, is about six years behind.
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Each Voyager carries it own kind of “postcards” in the form of a golden record that Sagan was instrumental in creating. The 12-inch, gold-plated copper discs carry spoken greetings in 55 languages from people all around Earth, along with 115 images and hundreds of sounds representing our home planet.

NASA’s Voyager site

Fun k-12 Science and Engineering Learning

photo of robots

The Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center for Initiatives in Pre-College Education (CIPCE):

For too long now the nation’s best research universities have often sat idle while our the problems of our system of public school education have reached crisis proportion. Rensselaer, through CIPCE, intends to take the lead in forging new relationships which will become models for others to follow.

A bold declaration and vision which, thankfully, they back up with action.

CIPCE works closely with Rensselaer’s Academy of Electronic Media to develop K-12 interactive multimedia materials and to educate teachers in their use. We are interested in studying how cutting edge educational technologies can affect teaching and learning in the classroom.

They offer several Interactive MultiMedia downloads form their site. We have added a directory of sites that offer k-12 resources (ciriculum, tools, etc. for teachers) and interesting online and offline resources for sudents: science education sites as part of our science links directory.
Robotics for k-12 see: Continue reading →

Robots Sharing Talents

photo of robots

Robot team-mates tap into each others’ talents by Tom Simonite

Teams of robots that can remotely tap into each other’s sensors and computers in order to perform tricky tasks have been developed by researchers in Sweden. The robots can, for example, negotiate their way past awkward obstacles by relaying different viewpoints to one another.
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“Our system allows robots to start with a task, extract which capabilities are needed and find out where to access them,” Lundh explains. “If you don’t have the capabilities on your own you have to search for them.”

The number of cool research projects underway today is amazing.

Image: Tapping into another robot’s vision system could help a bot move a block around (from Robert Lundh)