Category Archives: Engineering

Getting Students Hooked on Engineering

Another article on project lead the way: Project is getting students hooked on engineering early

Brent Kindred, state leader for Project Lead the Way at the Department of Public Instruction, said the pre-engineering education movement has been gathering momentum since 2003 largely because “we are a manufacturing state, and we have a lack of engineers and highly skilled, highly trained workers.”

“Project Lead the Way is the first national pre-engineering program that’s had any real sustainability,” said John Farrow, a professor at the Milwaukee School of Engineering who is also the state affiliate director of the program. MSOE is the only Wisconsin college certified to offer the teacher training courses. In summer, MSOE expected 15 teachers in the middle school training course but ended up with about 37, Farrow said.

Jetson Jetplane

photo of person flying a jet-pack with wings

Finally the Jetpacks we were promised by the Jetson’s 🙂 Well not really but still pretty cool. Many very cool videos (they broke link so I removed it 🙁 ) on the Jet-man website show the jetpack in action. The flight is controlled by body movements (not controls, other than the gas). To fly, currently, Yves Rossy jumps from a plane and then extends the wings turns on the jets. Some additional improvements are needed to allow Yves to achieve ground take-offs, aerobatic operations and vertical climbs.

Science and Engineering Search Engine

The December 2006 Newsletter of the Google Librarian Center mentions the Curious Cat Science and Engineering Custom Search Engine. As they state it “searches a combination of lay and official sites for science and engineering information.”

The search box for this search is conveniently located on the right hand side of each page on our blog (there is a search box for this search and one for searching just this blog). The science and engineering Custom Search Engine (CSE) uses our selection of sites along with Google search technology to provide search results. We hope you find it useful. Please share your feedback.

$25 Million for Marquette College of Engineering

$25 million gift for the Marquette College of Engineering:

The Marquette University College of Engineering has received a gift commitment of more than $25 million as the first part of a legacy grant that could provide the university with an additional future $1 million a year in perpetuity, Marquette President Robert A. Wild announced Monday. The gift is from an engineering alumnus and his wife who have asked to remain anonymously.
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The $25 million gift is part of a broader fund-raising initiative to “transform the College of Engineering through endowed scholarships and faculty positions, an enhanced curriculum, extensive research opportunities and completion of a Discovery Learning Complex with state-of-the-art facilities and equipment,” Wild said. The benefactors, he noted, hope the gift “inspires others to help fund the bold initiatives that will position the College of Engineering as the premiere Catholic institution in the nation for engineering education.”

How Do Wii Game Controllers Work?

How Do Motion-Sensing Video Game Controllers Work?:

The new Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation 3 gaming systems, just released for the holidays, both include motion-sensing controllers.
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But how are the controllers able to precisely and accurately measure physical movement? At the heart of the controller technology are tiny accelerometers. Inside these chips, silicon springs anchor a silicon wafer to the rigid controller. As you wave the controller through the air at an attacking enemy, the wafer presses onto the springs, just as you are pressed against the seat of a car when you stomp on the gas pedal. The faster the controller accelerates, the more the wafer moves relative to the rest of the chip.
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But accelerometers alone cannot provide complete control, because small positional errors add up over time, like when you need to re-center your mouse on a mousepad. Nintendo addressed this problem by including a sensor bar that can be placed above or below the television. Each end of the bar emits a beam of infrared light like a television remote, which is monitored by a sensor on the controller that works like a digital camera: by seeing where the two spots of light fall on its grid of more than 750,000 pixels, the sensor can determine where the controller is pointing and translate it to a position on the television screen.

Google Patent Search Fun

Google search for patents: the display of the patents found is very nice – Google provides a standard template listing information on the inventors, claims and linking to referenced patents. Example: Method for node ranking in a linked database – update. It seems to me the search could be improved. Still it is interesting: Patent searches for Thomas A. Edison – 3d hologram television –

It also is obvious there are way too many patent applications for obvious things. Two simple examples, of many: Method of concealing partial baldness – making a sandwich.

Mexican Engineering Brain Drain

Network to curb Mexican brain drain by Kathleen Miller

Mexico hopes its nascent high-tech sector can create good jobs and help diversify the economy at a time when rising wages for low-skill labor are driving textile and assembly factories to poorer nations in Asia and Central America.
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A recent analysis by Mexican and U.S. immigration experts found that nearly a third of all Mexicans with advanced degrees leave Mexico for the U.S.
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Camacho, who heads the program’s pioneering Silicon Valley chapter, says the idea arose during a 2004 meeting between Mexican President Vicente Fox and the chief executive of major chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Hector Ruiz, who was born in Mexico but studied engineering in the United States and went on to build a career there.

Mexico’s government has sponsored conferences for the network, but Camacho says the group is growing more by word of mouth. His Silicon Valley chapter holds regular meetings to share ideas and there are plans for similar groups in other U.S. cities.

The Magnetic Fridge

A cool new idea from British scientists: the magnetic fridge by Michael Pollitt:

Your kitchen fridge has a compressor, which turns a gas into a liquid, releasing heat (which you’ll feel at the back of the fridge). The liquid is then pumped round the inside walls of the fridge, where it draws heat from the contents; that turns it into a gas, which is pumped on to the compressor.
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A magnetic fridge works like this. Powdered gadolinium (with coarse grains for good heat transfer qualities) is put into a magnetic field. It heats up as the randomly ordered magnetic moments – the electrons with spin – are aligned, or “ordered”, by the field. The newly-acquired heat – a boost of between 2-5C, depending on the gadolinium’s original temperature – is removed by a circulating fluid, like a conventional fridge.

The magnetic field is removed and the gadolinium cools below its starting temperature as the electrons resume their previously disordered state. Heat from the system to be cooled – your fridge interior – can then be transferred to the now cooler metal. Then all you do is endlessly repeat. But unlike conventional fridges, which need very toxic chemicals, the only liquid needed for heat transfer is water, alcohol or, more likely, antifreeze.

40% energy savings are predicted.

USA Still Leads In Innovation

In innovation, the U.S. still leads by Dr. Venkat Lakshmi:

But this is not entirely the case. The United States is still the center of the world when it comes to innovation and original thinking. In this year’s Nobel Prizes, Americans won in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and economics. The Nobel Prize in literature was won by Turkish writer affiliated with Columbia University. The other exception was the prize for peace. So in four of six categories, the winners were Americans.

In the past few years, the United States has led the innovation in the Internet revolution. Who 10 years ago could imagine three 20-somethings coming up with the idea of posting video clips on the Internet? This led to the creation of YouTube, which was bought out by Google (yet another enterprise put together by two graduate students) for a mind-boggling sum of $1.6 billion.

I agree that the USA continues to lead especially in those 2 areas. Those winning Nobel Prizes normally made their breakthrough decades before. My guess is the United States will not have as large a percentage of winners from 2020-2029 as it did from 1990-1999 (and I can’t image many people would disagree). And the USA continues to do very well at commercializing innovation. Others are catching up, but still the USA is doing very well in this area – it seems to be the strongest position for the USA (among things such as manufacturing, basic science research, activity in space, k-12 science and engineering education, health care, robotics, science and engineering higher education…).

Micro-robots to ‘swim’ Through Veins

image of Escherichia coli bacterium with flagella

Micro-robots take off
Photo: Transmission Electron Microscopy photograph of an Escherichia coli bacterium with flagella. The micro-robots are being developed to mimic the swimming behaviour of E.coli.

Micro-robots that can ‘swim’ through the vascular and digestive systems of the human body to perform medical tasks via remote control and, in many cases, avoid invasive major surgery, are being developed at Monash University following today’s announcement that the project has been funded through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects scheme.