Category Archives: Engineering

NSF Engineering Education Program Grants

Grants awarded by NSF for engineering education programs include (next applications due Aug 2007):

Extraordinary Women Engineers (start date Oct 2006) – “to encourage more academically prepared high school girls to consider engineering as an attractive option for post-secondary education and subsequent careers in order to increase the number of women who make up the engineering workforce.”

Colleges of Engineering as Learning Organizations (Sep 2006) – “Based on the framework developed by Senge the PI will work with engineering colleges and departments to develop a rubric that will allow them to self-reflect, make governance decisions that benefit the organization, the faculty, and the students and continuously improve.”

Service-Learning Integrated throughout a College of Engineering (Sep 2005) – “Service-learning is the integration of academic subject matter with service to the community in credit-bearing courses, with key elements including reciprocity, reflection, coaching, community voice in projects.”

National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship

The National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG) pays the fellow’s full tuition and required fees (not to include room and board). In addition, fellows receive a stipend for 12-month tenures. The stipend levels for each of the 12-month tenures are as follows:
Period First Year Second Year Third Year
Amount $30,500 $31,000 $31,500

From 2003 to 2006, 656 awards were granted out of 10,593 applications. Applicaitons must be submitted by January 8, 2007.

Awards provided to applicants who will pursue a doctoral degree in, or closely related to (see web site for full list):

* Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering
* Chemical Engineering
* Computer and Computational Sciences
* Electrical Engineering
* Materials Science and Engineering
* Mathematics
* Mechanical Engineering
* Oceanography
* Physics

Using Viruses to Construct Electrodes and More

She harnesses viruses to make things

Manufacturing was once the province of human hands, then of machines. Angela Belcher, professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering at MIT, has pushed manufacturing in another, much smaller, direction: Her lab has genetically engineered viruses that can construct useful objects like electrodes and wires.
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Her lab employed this method to form an electrode that can be used in a lithium ion battery like the rechargeable ones used in electronics. The result looks like an innocuous length of celluloid tape, the sort you could use to wrap a package.

“It’s self-assembled,” says Belcher. “The viruses make these materials at room temperature.” So there’s little pollution.
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Belcher hopes to be making prototypes within the next two years. “Actual devices are five to 10 years off.”

Engineered Art

Strandbeest – “Kinetic Sculptures” by Theo Jansen. He creates mobile sculptures that walk with the wind.

More videos: Theo Jansen discusses the mechanics of this work at ArtFutura05 – video of another piece – BMW commercial

A Robot to Clean Your Room

Robot learns to grasp everyday chores

Cleaning up a living room after a party is just one of four challenges the project has set out to have a robot tackle. The other three include fetching a person or object from an office upon verbal request, showing guests around a dynamic environment and assembling an IKEA bookshelf using multiple tools.

Developing a single robot that can solve all these problems takes a small army of about 30 students and 10 computer science professors—Gary Bradski, Dan Jurafsky, Oussama Khatib, Daphne Koller, Jean-Claude Latombe, Chris Manning, Ng, Nils Nilsson, Kenneth Salisbury and Sebastian Thrun.

Related: robotics related posts

100 Innovations for 2006

Popular Science has selected the Best of What’s New. Previous posts talk about some of these, such as: One Laptop Per Child, New Soccer Ball, Grand Canyon Skywalk. And they discuss other breakthroughs like: Memory Spot, Sony Reader. They seem to be stretching a bit to reach 100 – still there are some cool items and it is a fun read. And where are some others: Lifestraw, Lego Mindstorm, Re-engineered Wheelchair…

Related: Inventions of the Year

Lifestraw

Lifestraw is an excellent example of an engineered appropriate technology solution.

At any given moment, about half of the world’s poor are suffering from waterborne diseases, of which over 6,000 – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water.

Today, more than one billion people of the world’s population are without access to safe water, causing lack of safe water supply to rob hundreds of women and girls of dignity, energy and time.

Safe water interventions, therefore, have vast potential to transform the lives of millions, especially in crucial areas such as poverty eradication, environmental upgradation, quality of life, child development and gender equality.

Lifestraw is a filter solution that allows water to be purified for about 6 months (before needing to be replaced) at a cost of just $3.50.

Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology

LIFT2 (Leadership Initiatives for Teaching and Technology) is an innovative professional learning program for middle and high school science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers. It is designed to help experienced and developing teachers relate classroom curriculum to authentic and relevant applications in the 21st Century workplace.
The program is based on a unique combination of graduate coursework, company sponsored externships in industry, the cornerstone of the program, and membership in an active community of learners.

Nanotechnology Experiment Accidentally Discovers Forger Fix

Security that is small and imperfectly formed by Michael Pollitt:

“One day the chip fell off the paper backing that it was being tested on and the laser just hit the paper instead. Whereas we would have expected to have got no signal, we actually got a signal that had all of the right characteristics for a security device. That was enormously surprising,” says Cowburn.

Rather than reaching for the glue, Cowburn investigated further and found that ordinary paper gave robust security signatures. The random pattern of the paper fibres scattered back the laser beam to detectors, giving far better results than the microchip.

After tuning the laser system, he also discovered that the probability of two pieces of paper producing an identical reading was unimaginably remote.

Wireless Power

Wireless energy could power consumer, industrial electronics

Soljacic realized that the close-range induction taking place inside a transformer–or something similar to it–could potentially transfer energy over longer distances, say, from one end of a room to the other. Instead of irradiating the environment with electromagnetic waves, a power transmitter would fill the space around it with a “non-radiative” electromagnetic field. Energy would only be picked up by gadgets specially designed to “resonate” with the field. Most of the energy not picked up by a receiver would be reabsorbed by the emitter.