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 designed to solve a peculiar vehicular traffic problem between China and Hong Kong – something that you don’t hear about everyday.

As the article describes, the problem at hand is that Hong Kong drivers drive on the left side of the road, while in China people drive on the right side of the road. So, what do you do about drivers crossing the border and needing to switch which side of the road they drive on? Naturally, smooth and continuous paths are more comfortable to drive on than paths consisting of sharp turns and stops, and the proposed Flipper Bridge addresses all of these needs brilliantly and elegantly in a neat figure 8 shape. Drivers that leave China on the right side of the road will enter Hong Kong on the left side of the road after driving across this bridge, perhaps hardly even noticing, and vice versa. While taking in the beautiful watery scenery, might we add.

Of course, just like many engineering designs, the Flipper Bridge is without shortcomings, as some people have pointed out. Some examples from the article and corresponding comments include questioning the safety of driving on the lower section of the bridge in the midst of high waves and mean weather in the vicinity, as well as making drivers aware that they are crossing into a region in which drivers drive on the opposite side of the road from where the drivers originated from. The seamless transition from right side to left side, or vice versa, can be dangerous to unsuspecting drivers.

Anyway, the images in the article depict the design quite well, especially the smooth curves and the grand figure 8 design. Check them out!

Ruoff argues that complete energy independence in America can already be done without any further investment in research. The problems we Americans face today are not technical; they are, instead, bureaucratic and psychological (or, appropriately, political and economical). Energy independence starts with “politics, ecology, economics, population, government, war, money,” and ends with the least important, that is, the actual science and engineering involved in affecting change for the future of energy generation and transmission.

There are bottlenecks down the line in politics, in the way people think, and in cost, and until these bottlenecks are overcome, it is impossible for the already available technology to become widely-built and put into operation.

The importance of this issue is apparent everywhere. Without energy, modern society cannot survive. There would be no trains and cars; there would be no computers and telephones; there would be no refrigerators and microwaves. Today, about 25% of the United States’s energy consumption goes to cars alone, 7% to other means of transportation, 10% to homes and offices, 25% to industry, and the rest to energy production and transmission itself, all totally about 30 billion megawatt-hours annually.

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only converted. So, what feeds this level of energy consumption? The largest source of energy used in the United States is petroleum oil—at around 40% (natural gas and coal are around 25% each). U.S. oil production peaked in the 1970 and has been significantly importing ever since at an exponential and alarming rate. Only in 1980 did U.S. energy consumption begin to appear to level out. But upon further analysis, this temporary dip is attributed to the outsourcing of manufacturing (then importing finished products to market). If we include imports from countries like China, the energy consumption curve of the United States would only continue to rise. In fact, energy consumption is growing much faster than domestic energy production in India and China. It is calculated that within 25 years, India and China will be using the same amount of energy as America is today.

It is a common understanding today that the U.S. energy policy needs to be reformed, for the sake of domestic energy security, if not for the sake of human sustainability on earth. Ruoff proposes the outline of potential solutions (aside from simply consuming less): [1] decrease population, [2] impose a $4 tax on gasoline, and [3] impose a big, exponential tax on heavy non-business vehicles. Specifically, build nuclear power plants domestically and completely eliminate the need of importing oil or gas. How do we pay for this program? It’s simple too. Ruoff proposes that we withdraw all our troops stationed in 761 military bases in 151 foreign countries, thereby saving about $250 billion annually, and all summarized in a simply 3-page proposal.

This seemly uncomplicated approach, however ideal, is impractical. The egregious American mindset is deeply embedded in the people, where bigger is better, faster is better, and more is better. Change comes, unfortunately, slow. Aggregate American disposition certainly does not change on its own. More needs to be done. Finally, we need to bear in mind that this is far from an insular, domestic problem. It is a global one that requires a global effort. As more and more people around the world adopt the American consumerist mentality, we are experiencing an exponentially growing need of energy.

Whichever way we approach this global energy crisis, though, this much is certain: the energy issue will either bring the world’s people together toward a unified effort, or result in its inevitable demise.

A model of space debris populations around Earth.

What kinds of problems could debris in space cause? They travel at speeds on the order of tens of thousands of miles per hour, which means that debris of any shape, size, and form will be destructive if it collides with a satellite or space shuttle. Collisions with space debris isn’t unheard of. Also, they could delay space launches if it is known that a large cloud of debris is hovering directly over the launch pad.

Space debris comes from a variety of sources. Nuts and bolts could become loose and float away from spacecraft during normal operation. When rocket stages (or segments) separate in space, they release debris. Also, in-space collisions between satellites, while rare, will create large-sized debris – the same goes for intentional spacecraft destruction, such as the Chinese anti-satellite test that was conducted a few years ago. Some of these events unleashes several thousand pieces of debris, most of which are tiny (less than an inch in size) and are much more difficult to track than larger-sized debris.

Over the past few decades, scientists and engineers have brainstormed possible solutions to decreasing space litter. However, all of the ideas have been technologically and/or economically infeasible. This could change as time goes on, especially as technology advances and/or the cost of launching a vehicle into space decreases. One possible solution is launching a garbage-collecting spacecraft to do just that, but what to do with the collected garbage is a problem. Another solution is somehow colliding objects with the orbiting debris in an effort to reduce their energy enough so that they fall into the Earth’s atmosphere (due to gravity) and burn up, but no one has thought of a feasible means to do that.

(Image from Wikipedia)

The study stressed that engineering approaches would only have a limited impact, and that efforts should continue to be focused on reducing CO2 emissions.

“(Governments) should make increased efforts toward mitigating and adapting to climate change and in particular agreeing to global emissions reductions of at least 50% on 1990 levels by 2050 and more thereafter,” the authors wrote.

But, they continued, there should be “further research and development” into geo-engineering options “to investigate whether low-risk methods can be made available if it becomes necessary to reduce the rate of warming this century”.

Injecting sea salt into the clouds could cool the planetOf the two basic geo-engineering approaches, the report concluded that those involving the removal of carbon dioxide were preferable, as they effectively return the climate system closer to its pre-industrial state.

But the authors found that many of these options were currently too expensive to implement widely.

This included “carbon capture and storage” methods, which require CO2 be captured directly from power plants and stored under the Earth’s surface.
Current proposed methods also work very slowly, taking many decades to remove enough carbon dioxide to significantly reduce the rate of temperature rise.

Of the carbon removal techniques assessed, three were considered to have most potential:
1. CO2 capture from ambient air: This would be the preferred method, as it effectively reverses the cause of climate change.
2. Enhanced weathering: This aims to enhance natural reactions of CO2 from the air with rocks and minerals. It was identified as a prospective longer-term option.
3. Land use and afforestation: The report found that land-use management could and should play a small but significant role in reducing the growth of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Read more about it here.

We can generalize the impact of regulations on companies to include engineering firms. If you spend resources to develop a product that does not meet requirements stated by government regulations, then in the capitalist point of view, your product is essentially useless because you cannot sell it to consumers and profit from it. Government regulations are especially burdensome to pharmaceutical and medical device companies that make devices such as artery stents and valves, because virtually all their products must receive approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before hitting the markets. Such government bureaucracy exists with good intentions in mind. In this case, the purpose of FDA regulations is to protect the end consumer from potentially harmful products. In the case of FINA’s ban of high-tech swimsuits, the purpose is to protect the integrity of the sport of swimming.

Swimming might be transformed into a purer form of the past.

Going back to the story of swimming, I have a personal interest in the issue of high-tech suits because I was a swimmer throughout middle school and high school. So-called “full-body suits” emerged at the 2000 Olympic Games around the time when I started swimming. During the seven years that I spent swimming, I never went further than wearing a Speedo Fastskin 2 “jammer” (suit that covers from waist to knees) in competitions. Some may say that I didn’t care enough to drop a few hundred bucks on a full-body suit used in a few major competitions each year, but in the end I believe that it’s the swimmer that makes the swimmer, not the suit that makes the swimmer (and yes, I love the sport of swimming). Skill and experience in the water can only be acquired through putting in the effort during training, but even swimmers who hold steadfastly to this belief will feel at a disadvantage in competition if they don’t follow suit (no pun intended) and invest in high-tech racing gear like their peers. Hopefully the FINA regulation will remedy this.