The National Engineering Design Challenge which promotes engineering by showing students ways engineers can solve social and community problems, is looking for sponsors. In the 2010 challenge, NEDC teams will put their creativity and problem-solving skills to use by designing and building an assisted technology device for a person in their community. Teams identify the problem they want to solve, work together to develop a solution and present their working prototype to an expert panel of judges.

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The Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running again after months of repairs. The $8 billion dollar collider “accelerated the machine’s twin beams of protons to 1.18 trillion volts… that surpasses the previous collider record of 0.98 trillion electron volts, set in 2001 by America’s Tevatron collider.”

An elite team of international physicists and engineers are continuing to make updates and repairs to the Large Hadron Collider in hopes of it reaching its full potential.

The theory behind a collider is simple: Send a beam of protons crashing into something, either a stationary target or a beam of particles traveling in the opposite direction, then wait and see what comes out.

As bigger and more powerful colliders were built, physicists began to uncover a plethora of tiny objects, such as quarks, which were held together by other tiny objects called gluons.

To understand the infinitesimal nature of these new objects, consider that if a quark measured an inch, an atom would stretch a thousand miles.

These discoveries allowed scientists to devise a picture of the universe at the subatomic level. Called the Standard Model, it is considered the most successful scientific theory in history, explaining how the melange of particles fits together and gives rise to the familiar forces that surround us.

One thing the standard model has not been able to do, Mark Wise (a Caltech physicist) said, is show why particles have mass and how that mass is distributed.

Scientists believe that’s because the particle responsible for mass, the Higgs boson — named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs — can’t be produced in today’s accelerators. Because it is thought to bind weakly with other particles, “you need a lot of collisions” to produce one, Wise said.

The Large Hadron Collider is located in a 17-mile circular tunnel 300 feet underground on the Franco-Swiss border. Scientists expect to surpass their recent record of accelerating to 1.18 trillion electron volts within the coming months.

ASEE’s fourth edition of their bi-annual magazine, eGFI – Engineering: Go For It! – is now available in both print form and online.

eFGI is run by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) and is “committed to promoting and enhancing efforts to improve K-12 STEM and engineering education”.

*Resources for teachers can be found at the eGFI blog.