“Americans feel prosperous based largely on the performance of three key economic indicators, said Ali Velshi, chief business correspondent for CNN. Are the values of their homes rising faster than inflation? Are their investments, whether for their children’s education or their own retirement, growing? And do their incomes equal or exceed increases in the cost of living?”

“Rebuilding a Real Economy: Unleashing Engineering Innovation: Summary of a Forum” has recently been published and is currently available online. This summary came from the 2009 Annual Meeting of the National Academy of Engineering, from a public forum with the same name, which highlights the main points brought about by seven leaders of the innovation system. These participants discussed why technological innovation is necessary for this nation to face the challenges of the 21^st century.

San Francisco Bay Bridge

In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake to hit Haiti this past week around the world television screens exploited images of crumbled buildings and poorly reinforced structures reminding us of another earthquake prone territory a little closer to home in California which is taking lengths to improve major infrastructure to a prominent landmark- The San Francisco Bay Bridge.

The Bay Area is known for its spectacular bridges,” says Bart Ney, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). “It’s part of our DNA, so naturally the aesthetics are a key part of the project.”

Caltrans ultimately decided to create a two-stage bridge, marrying a 1.3-mile Skyway to the first ever single-tower Self-Anchored Suspension (SAS) bridge. This revolutionary new structure hangs 1860 ft. of roadway from a single central tower, with the shorter western side rising from Yerba Buena Island, and the longer eastern side extending to meet with the Skyway.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there is a 62 percent chance that a magnitude 6.7 or larger quake will hit the area by 2032. The Bay Bridge is flanked on the west by the San Andreas Fault and on the east by the Hayward Fault — putting it right in the strike zone. Since the new bridge’s design specifications require that it last for 150 years, the engineers had to build in state-of-the-art seismic defenses. The SAS tower, for instance, incorporates deformable structural elements to absorb quake forces, much as a car’s crumple zone takes the brunt of a head-on collision. Thanks to this innovation, the structure should be able to accommodate seismically induced movement of up to 1 yard.

Traveling the high seas has just gotten way better! The Oasis of the Seas ready to set sail in 2010 will undoubtedly be the largest cruise liner to date with a capacity to hold over 6,300 passengers over 2,000 more than today’s average passenger ship. The 18 story high luxury liner is a design engineering first with an outdoor park, the largest at sea swimming pool and the most rooms with balconies and decks.  To build such a ship of this caliber over 2,800 people were employed to construct the ship’s design.  The ship has three 20 foot tall propellers  mounted on swiveling pods along with electric motors that deliver the equivalent of 30,000 horsepower.

“Ten years ago, we felt that 140,000 tons was as big as we could go,” says Oasis designer Harri Kulovaara. “Now that we’ve got the experience, we’ve taken a quantum leap.”

The National Engineering Design Challengewhich 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.

Image provided by www.dailymail.co.uk

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.

Baker, Hamilton, and two fellow electrical engineering majors spent over a year preparing their “low-cost wind turbine energy maximizer” for the International Future Energy Challenge in Australia last July.

The two-some invented a three-phase AC/DC converter (also known as “The Pegador” to its creators) to make the energy produced by wind turbines more efficient. The Pegador took home first prize.

After enjoying the success of placing first, Baker and Hamilton garnered success among engineering peers from universities worldwide.

Their participation in undergraduate research is what they claim to be the ultimate stepping-stone for future success within the scientific community and public-at-large.

“Going from book knowledge to tangibility experience has really accelerated my future career,” Baker said. “I’ve graduated with not only an honors degree, but an actual invention and experience.”

“Today’s engineering students want to make difference in the world … they want to make the world a better place through technological innovations that save lives and help clear the environment.” – Issa Batarseh, professor and director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Batarseh also oversaw the project.

There is no release date for the turbine at this time.

Photo Courtesy of AP Photo/Daniel Schwartz.

Schwartz found his inspiration for the smokrophone during dinner at an Italian restaurant in 2004 with his wife. He watched as a thin stream of smoke from a candle would waver each time his wife spoke. Shortly there after, Schwartz invested in a disco fog machine and began experimenting.

Unlike conventional microphones, the smokerophone doesn’t need a diaphragm to work. Schwartz believes that the device’s lack of a diaphragm is what could make it a “high-fidelity recording microphone, or a supersensitive long-range microphone for spying.”

The smokrophone prototype and its creator are scheduled for a premiere October performance at the Audio Engineering Society in New York.

The 6dot’s developers aim to improve upon the everyday frustrations of those who are visually impaired by making the identification of “seemingly similar” household items such as DVD’s, CD’s and canned foods easier.

Photo Courtesy of Patrick Gillooly, MIT News.

According to a press release issued by MIT, “Blind people really wanted to see this product on the market,” Karina Pikhart, Class of 2009, said.

Development of the 6dot escalated after students from MIT’s Product Engineering Processes course won a $7,500 cash prize at last spring’s IDEAS competition.

“We worked really closely with blind people” in developing it, she says, because “you really can’t develop a product without being in close touch with the people you’re developing it for.”

According to MIT, the company created by the students involved in the project does not plan on manufacturing the device but will continue to improve the system while waiting to get the 6dot licensed within the next two years.

“The goal is to get it into the hands of as many people as possible,” Pikhart said. “We’re … looking for a manufacturer who would take this on for the long haul. We want to keep improving it.”

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.

Image provided by www.parabolicarc.com

From March 31 through July 14, four Russians and two European engineers participated in a 150-day simulation chamber study to prepare for a future trip to Mars. The project was funded by the Houston-based National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI) and was also a partnership between the Russia’s Institute of Biomedical Problems and the European Space Agency.

The six international scientists conducted many experiments and also acted out realistic mission scenarios, such as emergency situations and 20 minute communications delays.

Dr. David F. Dinges, leader of the NSBRI group funded from University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and Rutgers, explained the benefits of conducting research with this special chamber:
“These tests and interventions have an impact beyond the space program. Many people work night shifts and in high-stress, confined environments that require alertness, such as power plant control rooms, railroad systems, hospitals, military operations, and fire and rescue situations. The things that we are learning here about how to enhance performance will be useful in many work environments… Additional goals were to see how different mission situations affected the various performance measures and to evaluate whether the interventions could indeed improve performance.”

For the NSBRI project overview, the following areas were addressed for research:
1) Operational Evaluation of a Photic Countermeasure to Improve Alertness, Performance, and Mood During Night-Shift Work
2) Monitoring of Crew Neurobehavioral Functions
3) Crew Interactions and Autonomy During Long-Duration Isolation and Confinement

The isolation facility was impressively built with “several interconnected, modules containing medical and scientific research areas, living quarters, a kitchen, a greenhouse, and an exercise facility.” Although this project was considered a success, it is a precursor a 520-Day research mission NSBRI hopes to schedule in 2010.