Planet, Less Dense Than Cork, Is Discovered

Puzzling Puffy Planet, Less Dense Than Cork, Is Discovered

The astronomers said they were baffled about how the planet formed and how it remained so puffy.

“The short answer is, I have no idea,” said Dimitar Sasselov, a professor of astronomy at Harvard and a member of the research team. “It’s a very strange planet.”

Engineering Jobs in Mexico

Maquila sunrise: Jobs headed back to Mexico:

What we see in Mexico today are things that have more engineering. And the reason why that is occurring is that it’s good to have your engineers in proximity to your manufacturing due to the fact that changes can be implemented much more quickly than if your center for manufacture is halfway around the world.

Today, Mexico’s pumping out more jet engines, semiconductors, and engine harnesses than its old staples like textiles and basic electronics. And that’s creating jobs for Mexican engineers inside the maquilas, like the Gulfstream Aerospace plant in Mexicali.

Read more about lean manufacturing (Toyota Production System) that values the performance improvement over short term savings on our management improvement blog. The kind of thing that allows Toyota to make a great deal of money manufacturing in the USA while Ford and GM can’t seem to do as well.
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Turning Trash into Electricity

Florida county plans to vaporize landfill trash:

The $425 million facility expected to be built in St. Lucie County will use lightning-like plasma arcs to turn trash into gas and rock-like material. It will be the first such plant in the nation operating on such a massive scale and the largest in the world.

Supporters say the process is cleaner than traditional trash incineration, though skeptics question whether the technology can meet the lofty expectations.

The 100,000-square-foot plant, slated to be operational in two years, is expected to vaporize 3,000 tons of garbage a day. County officials estimate their entire landfill — 4.3 million tons of trash collected since 1978 — will be gone in 18 years.

No byproduct will go unused, according to Geoplasma, the Atlanta-based company building and paying for the plant.

Synthetic, combustible gas produced in the process will be used to run turbines to create about 120 megawatts of electricity that will be sold back to the grid. The facility will operate on about a third of the power it generates, free from outside electricity.

Engineering Delivery Systems to the Brain

Engineering a ‘Trojan horse’ to sneak drugs into the brain by Terry Devitt:

Using engineered yeast as microscopic factories to produce human antibodies customized to recognize the surface features of cells that compose the blood-brain barrier, Shusta has developed a set of unique antibodies that may one day be used to ferry drugs to specified regions of the brain.
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With roughly 400 miles of blood vessels, the human brain is equipped with its own expansive delivery network for therapy – provided scientists are able to figure out a way to get past the blood-brain barrier. With different cell surface features in different parts of the circulatory system and also in different regions of the brain, it might be possible to customize antibodies to carry drugs to only those parts of the brain that would benefit from treatment.

Security of Electronic Voting

Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuVote-TS Voting Machine

This paper from Princeton University examines the security issues involved with electronic voting machines. The The consensus of the computer security community seems to be that they are not secure and should not be used as they currently exist. Yet for some reason they are being used.

It strikes me as similar to the uproar are the butterfly ballot scandal. Then the public learned that every year millions, of ballots were discarded as unusable and neither party had done much to fix the systemic problems. And then, when the problem was brought to the attention of the public, the parties acted as though this were some unforeseeable problem. They knew the system didn’t work and didn’t fix it. It seems to me the current electronic voting machines are an example of continuing this behavior. It would be better if they would listen to the scientists and not use a system which was so susceptible to creating a scandal.

Computer scientists have generally been skeptical of voting systems of this type, Direct Recording Electronic (DRE), which are essentially general-purpose computers running specialized election software. Experience with computer systems of all kinds shows that it is exceedingly difficult to ensure the reliability and security of complex software or to detect and diagnose problems when they do occur. Yet DREs rely fundamentally on the correct and secure operation of complex software programs. Simply put, many computer scientists doubt that paperless DREs can be made reliable and secure, and they expect that any failures of such systems would likely go undetected.

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The man who saved geometry

The man who saved geometry by Siobhan Roberts:

Coxeter’s legacy is the powerful push he gave the visual geometric method, and the resulting change in perspective that transformed the way mathematicians and scientists create and investigate. “Coxeter’s perspective and ideas are in the air we breathe,” said Ravi Vakil, at Stanford. “It’s not that his ideas are used to solve problems, it’s that the fundamental problems grow out of his ideas. He’s the soil.”

MIT’s molecular sieve advances protein research

Separating proteins from complex biological fluids such as blood is becoming increasingly important for understanding diseases and developing new treatments. The molecular sieve developed by MIT engineers is more precise than conventional methods and has the potential to be much faster.
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The key to the molecular sieve, which is made using microfabrication technology, is the uniform size of the nanopores through which proteins are separated from biological fluids. Millions of pores can be spread across a microchip the size of a thumbnail.
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Juhwan Yoo, a Caltech undergraduate, also participated in the research as a summer visiting student. Funding came from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Singapore-MIT Alliance.

NSF: The Art of Engineering

The Art of Engineering:

On the campus of the University of South Florida, one engineering professor (Professor Arthur David Snider ) responsible for teaching classes about differential equations and electromagnetism has created a popular course that merges his research world with the world of fine art.

Clean Water Filter

Clean water project hit by funding drought

Charities estimate that more than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water. In some parts of Africa, water-borne diseases such as cholera, dysentery and viral diarrhoea claim the lives of one in four children.
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The Newcastle project began after a group of postgraduate civil engineering students visited Ghana, Kenya and Malaysia and recognised the huge benefits that sustainable water filtration could have on health. One of the students, Matt Simpson, decided to devote his doctoral research project to this topic.
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At these temperatures the crop residue decomposes, releasing carbon dioxide gas which forms microscopic pores in the ceramic material exactly the right size to trap bacteria and viruses but allow water to pass through.

They are looking for funding to expand the adoption of this effort.

Bringing Eye Care to Thousands in India

New wireless networking system brings eye care to thousands in India

With high-speed links to the hospital, three of the clinics, also known as vision centers, screen about 1,500 patients each month. (Numbers are not yet available for the two other centers, which came online in May 2006.) Centers are run by a nurse trained in eye care. Patients first see the nurse, then spend about five minutes on a web camera consulting with an Aravind doctor. If the doctor determines that a closer examination or an operation is necessary, the patient is given a hospital appointment.

Another great example of applying technology to improve people’s lives. More on appropriate technology projects. It is great to see the focus on improving people’s lives, and using technology to do so.