Good simple idea. And then executed well – for nighttime at least. Crosswalk lights up when in use giving drivers a more visible clue to stop.
Related: Ministry of Silly Walks – Kindergarten Students Pedel Their Own Bus to School – Passion for Mechanical Engineering Nurtured as a Child – Bird Feeder That Automatically Takes Photos When Birds Feed – Encouraging Curiosity in Kids
Deepika Kurup, a 14-year-old New York student, won the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge for her invention of a solar-powered water jug that changes dirty water into purified drinking water. She won the top prize of $25,000.
During “the 5 minutes of my presentation 15 children have died from lack of clean drinking water.”
I am thankful we have kids like this to create solutions for us that will make the world a better place. We rely on hundreds of thousands of such people to use science and engineering methods to benefit society.
Related: Strawjet: Invention of the Year – Cheap Drinking Water From Seawater – Water and Electricity for All – Thanksgiving, Appropriately (power of capitalism and people to provide long term increases in standards of living)
Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren land on the moon: July 20, 1969. As Neil Armstrong took humanity’s first step onto the Moon he said:
Related: Experiment, dropping a hammer and feather on the Moon – Planetary scientist Jennifer Heldmann discusses the Moon – Apply to be an Astronaut – One Giant Leap For Mankind
Touchdown on Mars will take place August 5th, 2012 (PDT or August 6th EDT and GMT).
Related: NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover – Mars Opportunity Rover Continues Extended Exploration – Sunset on Mars
This huge tunnel boring machine (12 meters in diameter and 95 meters long) digs subway tunnels without disturbing the buildings above. Up to 350 meters of tunnel can constructed in a week.
Related: Extreme Engineering – Wave Disk Engine Could Increase Efficiency 5 Times – Car Style Mass Transit Mag Lev System
This is a very cool engineering solution. Wheeled locomotion is very efficient on the right terrain. This transformation lets the robot switch to climb stairs and handle rough terrain very nicely. A team of mechanical engineers at National Taiwan University built this energy-efficient leg-wheel hybrid mobile robot. From their description:
Based on this observation, shifting the hip joint out of the center of the circular rim and changing the continuous rotation motion to other motion patterns implies the locomotion switches from wheeled mode to legged mode. This motivated us to design a mechanism that directly controls the relative position of the circular rim with respect to the hip joint so it can generate both wheeled and legged motions. Because the circular rim is a 2-dimensional object, the most straightforward method to achieve this goal is to add a second degree of freedom (DOF) that can adjust the relative position of the hip joint to the center of the circular rim along the radial direction. The motions of the two DOFs are also orthogonal to each other. In addition, the same set of actuation power can be efficiently used in both wheeled and legged modes.
Related: Big Dog, The Robotic Dog (2008) – Robots That Start as Babies Master Walking Faster Than Those That Start as Adults – Self Re-assembling Robots – Soft Morphing Robot (soft tissue)
This summer, a few dozen Boston-area high school students chose to spend their mornings toiling away with a variety of materials to create working marvels of engineering in the Engineering Design Workshop, a month-long program that gives teenagers a hands-on experience with the joys and challenges of engineering.
None of the activities are prescribed; instead, students take part in brainstorming sessions on the first day, and things develop from there. Typically, the “counselors” — a mix of undergraduate and graduate students from MIT and other local universities — present a few ideas, and the high school students decide which projects they’d most like to work on. I really like the idea of involving the college students.
This year, the 22 students divided themselves into five projects: a modified Razor scooter, equipped with a motor and brakes; a sound system of giant tower speakers; remote-controlled “anything” (which ended up including cars, fish, birds and even a flying turtle); a mosaic tiger meticulously assembled from pieces of stained glass; and an electric cello.
Each student is allotted $100 to spend on materials for his or her group’s project; this way, projects that attract more students have a larger budget to work with. Counselors help them purchase supplies online and work with them on the construction from the ground up.
There are probably thousands of similar type activities throughout the year to help engage students in engineering. I think it is great, but we need to do more. We need to let young students know what they are missing. If people know the wonders of engineering and choose something else for their career path, that is fine. It is a shame when people don’t get to decide, because they never experience what engineering has to offer.
Read the full press release.
Related: Infinity Project: Engineering Education for Today’s Classroom – Rutgers Initiative to Help Disadvantaged Children – Inspirational Engineer – What Kids can Learn on Their Own
Wonderful design from Italy with great space saving furniture. Great design with wonderful engineering provides solutions that are a joy to see and live with. These are not cheap though. New York City distributors of the furniture.
Related: Toyota Engineering Development Process – Honda U3-X Personal Transport – Treadmill Cats: Friday Cat Fun #3 – Engineering Students Design Innovative Hand Dryer
Very interesting lecture on finding the missing memristor by R. Stanley Williams. From our post in 2008:
How We Found the Missing Memristor By R. Stanley Williams:
Related: Demystifying the Memristor – posts on computer science – von Neumann Architecture and Bottleneck
Dilbert’s bosses broke the video link (so I removed it) – not a good sign that they will succeed in my eyes. If they can’t follow basic web usability guidelines it doesn’t make me want to spend time on them.
Engineering TV is a site with lots of good webcasts for engineers: “by engineers for engineers! Focused on technical B2B engineering topics”. In the embedded webcast Dr. Ann Marie Sastry, Director of the Energy Systems Engineering Program at the University of Michigan, discusses a collaboration between GM and the University of Michigan in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Engineering and Professional Education Programs. This is a good example of university and business collaboration.
Related: Directory of site with science and engineering webcasts – Science Postercasts – posts on engineering education – Science and Engineering Lectures from VideoLectures.Net – previous post on Engineering TV
The football (soccer ball) for the 2010 FIFA World Cup features completely new, ground-breaking technology. Eight 3-D spherically formed panels are moulded together, harmoniously enveloping the inner carcass. The result is an energetic unit combined with perfect roundness.
Aero grooves create the clearly visible profile on the ball’s surface. The Grip’n’Groove profile circles around the entire ball in an optimal aerodynamic way. The integrated grooves provide unmatched flight characteristics, making this the most stable and most accurate Adidas football. The ground breaking performance features have been confirmed in comprehensive comparison tests at Loughborough University in England and countless checks in wind tunnel and the Adidas football laboratory in Scheinfeld, Germany.
The process, shown in the video, for manufacturing the footballs is way more complicate than I thought it would be.
Related: Full Adidas press release – The Science of the Football Swerve – Engineering Basketball Flop – Sports Engineering
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