Category Archives: Engineering

NASA Engineering Challenges

NASA has been increasing the use of challenges to encourage innovation along the lines they could use for their future missions. The NASA challenges now 9 open challenges including the: beam power challenge and the astronaut glove challenge.

These centennial challenges provide a small monetary award to encourage solutions to challenges.

By making awards based on actual achievements, instead of proposals, Centennial Challenges seeks novel solutions to NASA’s mission challenges from non-traditional sources of innovation in academia, industry and the public.

Previous post: NASA Telerobotic Competition

Like to Tinker? NASA’s Looking for You by Noah Shachtman

Many of NASA’s contests also center on robotics. The Telerobotic Construction Challenge, scheduled for August 2007, requires a team of machines to assemble items with minimal human supervision. The idea is to let robots, instead of astronauts, build shelters and machinery on the moon and Mars.

Organs Engineered in a Lab

Straight Out of Science Fiction: Organs Engineered in a Lab:

Several years after receiving new bladders engineered entirely in a laboratory, seven young patients are all still healthy.

It marks the first long-term success of total-organ tissue regeneration, an area of medicine that until now was more the stuff of science fiction than clinical reality.

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

Cheap Drinking Water From Seawater

Image of process to get cheap drinking water from seawater

New membrane technology offers cheap drinking water from seawater

The consumption of drinking water is still increasing, while the availability of drinking water decreases. About 1 billion people in the world have no access to enough clean drinking water, while 70% of the Earth is covered with water.
…
Other techniques to convert seawater into drinking water, like RO, MSF, or MED, use a lot of energy to vaporize the water or push the water through a membrane under high pressure. Memstill uses cheap waste-energy, which cuts down the energy consumption and CO2 emissions. The cost of desalination of one cubic meter water with Memstill could be under $0.50, where other distillation techniques cost about 1 dollar for the same amount of water.

State-of-the-art desalination technology – more information on the memstill web site.

Robot Dreams

RAYERD-X robot

Video podcast of amazing robot:

One of the most surprising robots that appeared at the 9th Robo-One competition held here in Tokyo on March 18-19th, 2006, was RAYERED-X developed by Asurada. Its unique design allows it to reconfigure and transform itself into some amazing shapes. At first it looks like a short tower, then becomes a carousel, then a walking spider, then into a tall biped battle robot.

All sorts of robot news via the Robot Dreams blog, including RAYERD-X – The Magical Robot:

The robot really surprised the crowds, but may have puzzled the panel of judges to some extent. It’s hard to make a direct comparison between RAYERD-X and the more conventional robot designs. Nevertheless, it did capture the 24th position during the initial Demonstration phase of the Robo-One 9 competition and was awarded the Sunrise Special Prize.

RAYERD-X web site (Japanese).

2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events

2006 FIRST Robotics Competition Regional Events in Philadelphia, Denver, Houston and more 30 March – 1 April.

Competition events are, in the words of our teams, “full of passion, excitement, joy, and sorrow…the thrill of success and the agony of defeat.” The FIRST Robotics Competition has grown to 33 regional events and the Championship.

Boston FIRST Robotics Event by Computer Science Teacher

I was amazed at how much interest in engineering and science FIRST generated. A lot of students were inspired to look at area of education that they had never ever thought about before.

One of the things I noticed this year was that the number of girls involved in FIRST continues to climb. At the Boston event three of the 44 teams were all girls. All of the teams seemed to have significant numbers of girls. People at FIRST say that there are upwards of 30% girls in the program. That could be better of course but it is growing.
…
I highly recommend you drop in on one. FIRST has to be seen to really be understood.

See previous post: For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST)

Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge

Shift Bicycle photo

The History Channel and Invent Now, announced the 25 semi-finalists of the Modern Marvels Invent
Now Challenge, a national competition that provides an opportunity for independent inventors to be recognized and to influence the ever-changing face of invention.

The semi-finalists, who hail from 17 states across the U.S. and range in age from 19 to 80, were chosen from nearly 4,300 submissions entered, a number that confirms that the inventive spirit in America is alive
and well. This spring, the Challenge will ultimately name the invention of one of these 25 semi-finalists as the 2006 Modern Marvel of the Year during Modern Marvels: Great Inventions Week on The History Channel May 24-27th.

Innvetions include:

Matthew C. Grossman, Student, Austin, TX – Shift Bicycle (shown in photo): This bicycle is intended to help small children learn to balance on their own without the crutch of training wheels and the worry of skinned knees. The bicycle features two rear wheels that are spread apart at slow speeds to provide critical stability, and as the rider gains speed, the two rear wheels merge together to act as one wheel until the rider reduces speed and consequently returns the bicycle to the two wheel configuration. More information on the bike: new bike design for toddlers wins international competition

Russell D. Keller, Truck Driver, Oklahoma, OK – Drag Vent: An air diversion device captures a flow of air from above a roadway vehicle and forcibly diverts the captured air to the center of the low pressure area at the rear of the vehicle, thus reducing the amount of drag force applied to the vehicle and increasing the vehicles efficiency of operation.

Randal J. Kwapis, Computer Engineer, New Boston, MI – Typhoon: The Typhoon is an everyday manual wheelchair that utilizes shock-absorbing technology to make the chair easier to propel over rough terrain like grass and gravel.

Find more information on the semi-finalists and the Modern Marvels Invent Now Challenge

via Make

GE’s Edison Desk Blog

photo of windmills

GE global research’s Edison Desk blog provides interesting posts on the scientific and engineering research at GE. They provide interesting reading and, as I am sure is part of GE’s plan, let GE present their company in a positive light (so far the text is a bit too heavy on public relations spin, in my opinion, but it is still interesting). For example, Reaching for A High Penetration of Renewable Energy in The Grid:

Many additional challenges exist. Technologies that ease the integration of renewable energy resources into the grid will have a large impact in driving continued growth for these industries. Technology needs range from advanced component design to renewable resource forecasting and all the way through to large-scale system designs which take into consideration the aggregation of diverse power generation technologies to form dispatchable entities (such as wind-hydro hybrids, for example)

and Your Movie Collection on a Single Disk:

However, the capacity of the discs is being increased just enough to put a single HDTV movie on one disc. The Holographic Storage technology that our team is working on leapfrogs these next generation formats enabling users to put over 40 HDTV movies or over 200 standard definition movies on a single disc.

Students put Scientific Principles to Use

Lessons in Innovation by Shannon Mullen (site removed content – poor usability)
Instructor encourages students to put scientific principles to use … one LEGO brick at a time.

The mini course, called Engineering Experiences, uses an educational approach known as “discovery-based learning.” As the name implies, the idea is for students to learn by doing, through trial and error. Hotaling and her colleagues try to remain on the sidelines, guiding the students with questions, rather than spooning out solutions.

The mission of the Stevens Institute Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science is to catalyze and support excellence in teaching and learning of science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) and other core subjects through innovative, research-based instructional strategies and use of novel technologies.

Science and Engineering Jobs

Alarm as white-collar jobs vanish overseas (link broken so I removed it), Australian Financial Review:

The council’s draft report, a copy of which was obtained by the Australian Financial Review, says Australia needs to respond by investing in education and research and development, and by linking up with developing knowledge sectors in China and India.

There has been a steady progression up the value scale in work sent to low-cost countries – from manufacturing to data processing, call centres and computer software.

Now there is evidence that China and India are competing for high-level jobs in financial services, industrial design, architecture, research and development, engineering, medicine and even management areas such as human resources and business consulting.

Every country realizes the value to their economy of jobs in science, engineering and technology. Countries are taking steps to create a environment that will attract those jobs. Countries that do this less effectively will suffer.

Previous posts on the topic of economics, science and engineering

Smokeless Stove Uses 80% Less Fuel

Philips Smokeless Stove Uses 80% Less Fuel, Saves Lives

300 million families in the world’s poorest regions burn wood for cooking, and smoke and toxic emissions kill 1.6 million people per year.

That claim in the article is disputed by a comment on the web site. The difficulty of drawing direct causation for many medical problems makes such claims difficult to prove. A scientific paper explores the issue:

Chronic pulmonary disease in rural women exposed to biomass fumes

There is little question finding engineering solutions that serve to reduce health risks are often much better than trying to deal with the health consequences after people are sick. So providing safe drinking water, for example, will do more for health than increase spending on medical care to treat those who get sick.

Additionally the opportunities to save lives and improve health in the world often do not require cutting edge science. It is often a matter of engineering effective solutions for hundreds of millions and billions of people living without what those in the wealthy take for granted (Water and Electricity for All – Solar Powered Hearing Aid – Appropriate Technology).