Feature Channels: Engineering

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A good deal of research shows that surplus heat, such as from data centres, lends itself well as a heat source.

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Since the 1970s, scientists have known that copper has a special ability to transform carbon dioxide into valuable chemicals and fuels. But for many years, scientists have struggled to understand how this common metal works as an electrocatalyst, a mechanism that uses energy from electrons to chemically transform molecules into different products.

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Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have found a way to use small shocks of electricity to disinfect water, reducing energy consumption, cost, and environmental impact. The technology could be integrated into the electric grid or even powered by batteries.

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The cement industry emits more than 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide worldwide from the manufacturing of about 4.5 gigatons of cement every year because of its carbon-dioxide- and energy-intensive processing. This amount of cement is necessary to produce the concrete that shapes modern infrastructure.

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An international team led by researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has developed a universal connector to assemble stretchable devices simply and quickly, in a ‘Lego-like’ manner.

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Professor and Dean of Graduate Education Karen Panetta of the Tufts University School of Engineering was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her trailblazing efforts in supporting women in STEM and her outstanding research contributions in the field of electrical and computer engineering. Election to the academy is one of the foremost professional distinctions in engineering.

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The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT, President Kim, Byung-Suk) has announced a new approach for predicting the rip currents.

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A team of FAMU-FSU College of Engineering researchers at the High-Performance Materials Institute completed the first-ever study on how purified boron nitride nanotubes remain stable in extreme temperatures in inert environments.

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The recipient of grants from the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, totaling $22.4 million, ASU Professor Daniel Bliss is now working on two advanced computing projects, both of which are producing reimagined “chips,” or microprocessors, that are the foundation for most of today’s electronics — from supercomputers to smart devices to the technology that makes autonomous vehicles self-driving.

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A new all-dry polymerization technique uses reactive vapors to create thin films with enhanced properties, such as mechanical strength, kinetics and morphology.

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A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck south central Turkey near the Turkey/Syria border on February 6. Within 11 minutes, a magnitude 6.7 aftershock convulsed a region 60 miles north. So far, more than 35,000 people have died, surpassing Japan’s Fukushima earthquake disaster in March 2011. Scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said an earthquake of this magnitude is rare anywhere in the world Husam Najm, a professor of civil and environmental engineering in the Rutgers School of Engineering who specializes in the study of various advanced concrete materials and the design of novel forms of concrete bridges, discusses the unfolding tragedy, its causes and efforts to design earthquake-resistant structures to stave off such catastrophic losses in the future.

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Georgia Tech-Europe and MIT researchers are using emerging technology to demonstrate a process that will enable more immersive and realistic virtual and augmented reality displays with the world’s smallest and thinnest micro-LEDs.

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Most methods of editing bacterial genomes use plasmids to transfer DNA between bacterial cells, but this approach isn’t always efficient in mixed microbial communities. This research instead developed a new phage-based DNA delivery tool that leverages these viruses’ ability to inject DNA into host bacteria. The researchers also used this tool to edit individual genes inside a target host organism within a living microbial community.

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If watching animals feast on human blood for 30-plus hours isn’t your idea of fun, don’t worry. The robot can do it.

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When it comes to China’s global surveillance efforts over military sites around the world, spy balloons are just as capable of collecting images as a satellite, according to U.S. officials.

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Players and coaches for the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs will spend hours and hours in film rooms this week in preparation for the Super Bowl.

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Lithium-ion batteries have remained unrivaled in terms of overall performance for several applications, as evidenced by their widespread use in everything from portable electronics to cellular base stations.

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Microgrid in a Box, it includes 320 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, and can tie seamlessly into a modern electrical grid and coordinate the distribution of electricity for a small village, military base, or, in the event of a disaster, a hospital, transportation depot, or other critical infrastructure building.

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory Weinberg Fellow Addis Fuhr uses quantum chemistry and machine learning methods to advance new materials.

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Modeling the effects of earthquakes on homes, businesses, and infrastructure is about to get a lot easier, thanks to advanced simulations performed on the world's fastest supercomputers.

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Splitter, who is a senior researcher in fuel science and engine technologies, was selected for his early career contributions in combustion as well as his potential for future leadership in the field and service to the research community

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The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST, President Seok Jin Yoon) announced that Dr. Jihyun Hong's research team at the Energy Materials Research Center identified the cause of the rapid decline in life span-a chronic problem of high-capacity manganese-based spinel cathode materials.

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In honor of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated on Feb. 11, Northern Arizona University asked a variety of woman scientists why they chose their field and what advice they had for women and girls hoping to follow the same path.

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University of Miami College of Engineering faculty members Nurcin Celik and Derin Ural lived through the 1999 temblor that struck near the Turkish city of Izmit. They stand ready to offer their expertise in the aftermath of Monday’s disaster.

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The world generates about 300 million tons of plastic waste annually, and more than 90% of all plastic ever made has never been recycled. Part of what drives all that waste into landfills or into the environment is the difficulty of recycling plastic, which is designed to last for a very long time. Traditional plastic recycling suffers from a fundamental flaw, said Marcus Foston: there’s no financial incentive for companies to do it.

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Cerebras Systems, the pioneer in high performance artificial intelligence (AI) compute, today announced, for the first time ever, the simulation of a high-resolution natural convection workload at near real-time rates.

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At a traffic light, red means stop and green means go. But transportation engineers are now proposing a “white light,” which would enable autonomous vehicles to help control traffic flow – and let human drivers know what’s going on.

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The U.S. Department of Energy presented distinguished team awards to one Argonne team of eight whose conversion of nuclear research reactors makes the world safer, and to one Argonne scientist from a diverse team of 43 whose work advances the future of aviation fuels.

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Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have developed a new calibration algorithm for technology that turns common materials into touch sensors.

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The University of Texas at El Paso has received a $1.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to create a pipeline of scientists and engineers from underrepresented groups with advanced degrees in modeling and simulation.

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Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS, President Hyun-Min Park) developed a non-contact flow sensor capable of measuring the amount of epoxy used in the semiconductor fabrication process in real time.

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Combined ballistic impacts pose a major challenge for engineers who build structures that must withstand extreme stresses.

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Electronic components are becoming smaller, more complex and more powerful – this calls for new solutions for joining them. An Empa team is developing nanostructured joining materials for the next generation of microelectronics and other demanding applications.

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Argonne National Laboratory will be partnering with three companies as part of a voucher program provided by the Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear program of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.

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Experts assembling sPHENIX, a state-of-the-art particle detector at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, successfully installed a major tracking component on Jan. 19. The Time Projection Chamber, or TPC, is one of the final pieces to move into place before sPHENIX begins tracking particle smash-ups at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) this spring.

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Glaucoma is a common ocular disease in which the optic nerve malfunctions due to the increased intraocular pressure (IOP) caused by drainage canal blocking in the eye.

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Sibendu Som, whose work focuses on high-fidelity simulations of power generation and propulsion systems, has been designated a fellow by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

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Vishal Saxena is an associate professor in the University of Delaware’s College of Engineering exploring Analog Mixed-Signal and Photonic Integrated Circuits (AMPIC).

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A team of Stony Brook University researchers believe they created a new method to significantly improve burn assessment. They are employing a physics-based neural network model that uses terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) data for non-invasive burn assessment. Details of their method are published in a paper in Biomedical Optics Express.

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Smart voice assistants could make the laboratory safer for scientists and technicians who handle infectious samples. Researchers in ACS Sensors now report a small, voice-activated device that can extract and pretreat bacterial DNA, helping protect those on the front lines of disease outbreaks.

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Gel-like materials that can be injected into the body hold great potential to heal injured tissues or manufacture entirely new tissues.

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Blends of hydrogen and methane are a promising alternative vehicle fuel that could help reduce carbon dioxide emissions. To make these fuels viable, researchers need to understand how they burn, especially in small, turbocharged internal combustion engines. In this study, researchers examined the impact of non-thermal chemical kinetics on “super-knock,” a combustion mechanism that can cause severe engine damage.

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A chemical engineer developing more environmentally friendly materials and a geologist exploring the chemistry of Earth’s carbon reservoirs are the latest Florida State University faculty members to be named Fellows by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS.