Category Archives: Engineering

Slowing Down Light

The achievement is the latest in the fast-paced field of “slow light” — a discipline that barely existed a decade ago. While other researchers have dragged light to slower speeds than the Rochester scientists, who got it down to one-three-hundredth of its normal velocity, the new method is far simpler. That means the dream of domesticating one of nature’s most feral forces for use in computing, image processing and a host of military and homeland security applications could be nigh.

“This is a big step toward bringing slow-light technology into practical usage,” said Steve Harris, a professor of electrical engineering and applied physics at Stanford University. As the fleetest form of energy in the universe, light has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of technologies. Pulses of light can substitute for the digital “ones” and “zeros” that are today conveyed by relatively massive electrons on silicon chips.

Millennials in our Lifetime?

No I don’t mean the generation Y types born in the 1980s and 1990s I mean 1,000 year old people. I doubt it, but according to Cambridge University geneticist Aubrey de Grey – yes. And his credentials are better than mine, well I guess some of us might see who is right. ‘We will be able to live to 1,000’. Do You Want to Live Forever?:

As he surveyed the literature, de Grey reached the conclusion that there are seven distinct ingredients in the aging process, and that emerging understanding of molecular biology shows promise of one day providing appropriate technologies by which each of them might be manipulated — “perturbed,” in the jargon of biologists. He bases his certainty that there are only seven such factors on the fact that no new factor has been discovered in some twenty years, despite the flourishing state of research in the field known as biogeronÂtology, the science of aging; his certainty that he is the man to lead the crusade for endless life is based on his conception that the qualification needed to accomplish it is the mindset he brings to the problem: the goal-driven orientation of an engineer rather than the curiosity-driven orientation of the basic scientists who have made and will continue to make the laboratory discoveries that he intends to employ.

Aubrey de Grey Responds – Methuselah Mouse Man – Aubrey de Grey on TEDTalks: Aging is “an engineering problem” – The Prophet of Immortality

Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond

Educating Engineers for 2020 and Beyond by Charles M. Vest, President Emeritus, MIT Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering (nominated to become the President of the National Academy of Engineering, with a term starting in July 2007). A 70 minute videocast:

To prepare this new generation, engineering schools should focus on creating an environment that provides inspiration. In the long run, offering “exciting, creative adventures, rigorous, demanding and empowering milieus is more important than specifying details of the curriculum,” says Vest. Students are “driven by passion, curiosity, engagement and dreams.” Give them opportunities to discover and do – to participate in research teams, perform challenging work in industry, gain professional experience in other countries. Vest says, “We must ensure the best and brightest become engineers of 2020 and beyond. We can’t afford to fail.”

via: Video: Former MIT President on the future of engineering education

Science, Engineering and the Future of the American Economy

9 leaders (Craig Barrett, Charles Vest, Scott McNealy, Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Judith Rodin, Rick Rashid, Nick Donofrio, Dr. Ralph Wyndrum Jr. and Lou Dobbs) share their thoughts in Keeping Research and Leadership at Home by Vivek Wadhwa:

[several] stress the need to improve K-12 education, encourage students to study more math and engineering, bring in the best and brightest talent from around the world, and up the ante in basic research.
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Craig Barrett, Intel chairman – Currently we have lost the race in K-12 education, we are losing our position as a top educator of science, technology, engineering and mathematics students, we are losing our lead in university research, and we have our head in the sand on government policy.
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Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande, Sycamore Networks co-founder and chairman – We believe that all of this greatly increases the chances of a particular innovation having impact. Such sophisticated systems can only be developed in the U.S. because it is the only country with both flexible thinking and free markets.
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Charles Vest, former president of MIT, president-elect of the National Academy of Engineering – We’re on top, but our share of the world’s R&D spending, new patents, scientific publications, researchers, and BA and PhD. degrees in science and engineering are all dropping. We need to start right now to strengthen investment in basic research, get serious about K-12 education, especially in math and science, and attract more of our best and brightest young men and women into what will be crucial and exciting careers in engineering and science.

In previous posts I discuss my thoughts on the important topics of science, engineering and the economy: The Future is Engineering – Science and Engineering in Global Economics – Engineering the Future Economy – Diplomacy and Science Research – Economics and Science and Engineering – U.S. Slipping on Science
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Asia: Rising Stars of Science and Engineering

Great report – The Atlas of Ideas: How Asian innovation can benefit us all by Charles Leadbeater and James Wilsdon:

Each country will develop differently. In South Korea strong government support has created a world-class information infrastructure.
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China is mobilising massive resources for innovation through ambitious long-term plans, funded by rapid economic growth. Beijing’s university district produces as many engineers as all of western Europe. China is developing world-class universities and attracting multinational innovation centres.
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India’s elite, trained at the Indian Institutes of Technology, are second to none. New institutions like the National Science and Engineering Foundation could energise a disjointed innovation system. Yet India’s innovation elite may face a rural backlash. Its infrastructure is in poor repair and cities like Bengalooru are congested. Even the much-vaunted IITs do not, unlike their US counterparts, animate innovation clusters.

Percentage of world share of scientific publications

Year	China	France	Germany	Japan	Korea	UK	US	EU-15
1995	2.05	6.09	7.62	8.65	0.79	8.88	33.54	34.36
1998	2.90	6.48	8.82	9.42	1.41	9.08	31.63	36.85
2001	4.30	6.33	8.68	9.52	2.01	8.90	31.01	36.55
2004	6.52	5.84	8.14	8.84	2.70	8.33	30.48	35.18

Excellent reading, the report is full of useful information I have not been able to obsorb yet.
Related: Diplomacy and Science Research – The World’s Best Research Universities – Engineering the Future Economy – Worldwide Science and Engineering Doctoral Degree Data – USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates – Increasing American Fellowship Support for Scientists and Engineers
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Get Your Own Science Art

hemoglobin represented in crystal

Cool science art from Bathsheba Sculpture.

The Molecule that Makes Breathing Worthwhile – Hemoglobin is the iron-bearing protein that most animals use to carry oxygen from their lungs to their muscles, or wherever it’s needed for metabolism, i.e. life. It’s the most important part of red blood cells, and its iron is what makes them red.

This sculpture, etched in a heavy 3 1/4″ glass cube, shows hemoglobin’s beautiful structure: the four heme groups each with its iron atom, the two alpha and two beta subunits, and the translucent molecular surface over all.

As well as being handsome and useful, hemoglobin is a star of scientific history. With its close relative myoglobin, it was the first protein to have its 3D structure determined by X-ray crystallography. Max Perutz and John Kendrew at Cambridge University received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for doing it.

The site offers various crystals and sculptures created by Bathsheba Grossman. The art itself is very cool and the site includes interesting information on the science represented by the art and the engineering behind creating the art.

The points are tiny (.1mm) fractures created by a focused laser beam. The conical beam, with a focal length of about 3”³, shines into the glass without damaging it except at the focal point. At that one point, concentrated energy heats the glass to the cracking point, causing a microfracture.

To draw more points, the laser is pulsed on and off. To make the beam move between points, it’s reflected from a mirror that is repositioned between pulses. The mirror is moved by computer-controlled motors, so many points can be drawn with great speed and accuracy. A typical design might use several hundred thousand points, or half a million isn’t unusual in a large block, each placed with .001”³ accuracy.

Engineering Education Reality TV

Engineering Education Gets Its Own Reality TV Show

The show will feature two competing teams of high school students plucked from real life and follow their progress as they design, build, and test fun yet practical machines, such as an automatic pancake maker and a motorized wagon. The eight contestants, chosen through audition, have minimal engineering experience, though for many working with technology is an after-school hobby.
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The two four-student teams will rotate their members each week of the 13-week season as they compete, building one machine per episode. The scores for each episode will be divided among the participants, and the two with the highest scores at the season’s end will compete for the grand prize: a US $10,000 college scholarship provided by the Intel Foundation.

The show premiers on Public Broadcasting Service stations across the United States during EWeek, the annual engineering week event that takes place this year from 18 to 24 February. A second season is in the early planning stage.

PBS Kids – Design Squad TV show

3 “Moore Generations” of Chips at Once

HP nanotech design could be leap forward for chips by Therese Poletti

The scientists said their advance would equal a leap of three generations of Moore’s Law, a prediction formulated in 1964 by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that forecast chip makers could double the number of transistors on a chip every couple of years. “This is three generations of Moore’s Law, without having to do all the research and development to shrink the transistors,” said Stan Williams, a senior fellow at HP in Palo Alto. “If in some sense we can leapfrog three generations, that is something like five years of R&D. That is the potential of this breakthrough.”
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HP researchers plan to start manufacturing prototypes of their chip design later this year. They also said they expect to see a high rate of defects in the finished products, but that the greater amount of defects will be compensated for by the ability of the circuitry to quickly route around the failed circuits. The model for their chip design is based on a 45-nanometer chip, but with much smaller wiring in the chicken-wire crossbars of 4.5 nanometers.

“Hopefully, by the middle of this year, we will have a real working chip that we have run through an HP fab,” Williams said. “Our goal is that by 2010, we will have something that we can give our customers to play with.”

Inspiring a New Generation of Inventors

Here is some information on a great program that I was forwarded by a blog reader. Please post your comments to the blog and feel free to suggest information for us to share using the share your ideas link on the left column. Inspiring a New Generation of Inventors

Lemelson-MIT InvenTeams is a national grants initiative of the Lemelson-MIT Program to foster inventiveness among high school students. InvenTeams composed of high school students, teachers and mentors are asked to collaboratively identify a problem that they want to solve, research the problem, and then develop a prototype invention as an in-class or extracurricular project. Grants of up to $10,000 support each team’s efforts. InvenTeams are encouraged to work with community partners, specifically the potential beneficiaries of their invention.

InvenTeams was launched in 2002 as a pilot program that awarded grants to three New England high school teams for the 2002-03 academic year. It has expanded each year since its inception, and in the fall of 2005, awarded up to 18 InvenTeams grants.

Our Science and Engineering links have some great info (though I do need to improve the organization when I get some time); we have added a link to this program to our: Science Education Link Directory. Please share your suggestions.

Water From Air

Magic water harvesting machine:

Amazing. A gizmo which sucks the air in, then sucks the water out of the air, and then spews out clean fresh water. 500 Gallons of it – a day.

Pretty cool. Getting clean water is a large problem throughout the world. Unfortunately this is not the solution yet – each machine costs $500,000. still for the right situations this is useful. FEMA bought 2.

Its precise workings aren’t public, but they use a chemical process similar to the one that causes salt to absorb moisture from the air (and clump up your saltshaker). The water-harvesting technology was originally the brainchild of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which sought ways to ensure sustainable water supplies for U.S. combat troops deployed in arid regions like Iraq.

Darpa gave millions to research companies like LexCarb and Sciperio to create a contraption that could capture water in the Mesopotamian desert. But it was Aqua Sciences, that was first to put a product on the market that can operate in harsh climates.