Greetings everyone, and happy Thursday! Enjoy the autumn scenery around you while it lasts. As you may already know, designing products and systems to meet the needs of customers and end-users is perhaps the most important job of an engineer. Fast Company released an article a few months ago describing a particular bridge that was [...]
It is no surprise that the world is at a crossroads, where mass energy and material consumption meets global sustainability issues of epic proportions. On August 27, 2009, Arthur Ruoff gave a seminar talk at Cornell University titled “The Declaration of Energy Independence,” which focused on the energy policy of the the United States, and [...]
Here on Earth, we hear about the environmental problems that littering can cause. What about littering in space? The problem may not seem very important because, frankly, we don’t spend much time in space (if any) compared to on Earth. Also, space is quite a vast space, for lack of a better word, and it [...]
A BBC article today, “Engineering Earth ‘is feasible’,” highlights the possibility of successfully mitigating further climate change by removing carbon dioxide (the primary greenhouse gas) or by preventing the Sun’s rays from even reaching Earth. A UK Royal Society study finds that these tactics are “technically possible,” even though they may be practically infeasible. The [...]
A few months ago, we wrote a post here about the controversial high-tech swimsuits that permeate swimming competitions. Recently, FINA (the International Swimming Federation) issued a ban [New York Times] on these high-tech racing swimsuits in official competitions. Basically, this decision stems from the fact that these suits have become more of a “doping” mechanism, [...]