Today's guest is Dr. David Van Aken, who's developing new armor to protect soldiers.

Today's guests include Brad Leuther and Neil Schreiber, members of the Formula SAE Team. Brad is a senior in mechanical engineering from Fulton, Mo. Neil is a junior in mechanical engineering from Rolla, Mo. The Formula Car Team from Missouri University of Science and Technology placed second overall in an intercollegiate design and racing competition April 23-26 at the Virginia International Raceway. Approximately 50 teams competed in the event, which was won by the University of Wisconsin. The teams were judged in several presentation and performance categories, including acceleration tests that resemble drag races and an endurance test. Judges also evaluated cost and design.

Today's guest is Dr. David Van Aken, who's developing new armor to protect soldiers.

A team of students and professionals from Missouri University of Science and Technology will spend their spring break assessing the potential for a potable water system in a remote Haitian village. Corail Lamothe is located in the southeaster corner of Haiti, a short distance from the Caribbean Sea, but lacks adequate safe drinking water. Representatives from the Engineers Without Borders student chapter at Missouri University of Science and Technology will travel to the village March 24-28 with the goal of conducting a feasibility study for the design and construction of a new water system to address health needs in the community.

A group of faculty and students in the biological and computer sciences departments at Missouri University of Science and Technology are working with experts from around the world to develop a formal vocabulary, called an ontology, to describe the anatomy of more than 6,200 species of amphibians.

What do cattle and technology have in common? Plenty, if you talk to Dr. David Wright, a professor of English and technical communication at Missouri University of Science and Technology. For the past three years, Wright has been studying the cattle industry and developing a communications model from his research.

Today's guests include Dr. Diana Ahmad, Jill Hecht and Brandi Andersen. Jill and Brandi got involved in the uMR Honors Academy as freshmen. As part of their honors requirements, Jill and Brandi are enrolled in Dr. Diana Ahmad's class "Age of Jefferson and Jackson" this semester. Jill created a paper and poster that examined the ways 19th century views of domesticity have remnants in today's society. Brandi examined the second great awakening.

When a water supply is contaminated, people are usually ordered to boil their H2O. But if Dr. Curt Elmore's emergency drinking water system proves reliable, people will be able to drink water that has been treated with ultraviolet energy.

UMR team members constructed their 2007 solar house, which was originally built at UMR and then shipped to Washington, on the National Mall for the event. Twenty university teams entered houses, which were judged in categories ranging from architecture to engineering to comfort. UMR placed fourth in the market viability category.

This October, Jerrod Bouchard will attempt to become the fastest college student to be propelled by his or her own power. Bouchard, a senior in mechanical engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, will try to break the collegiate human-powered land speed record of 61.5 mph Oct 1-6 in Battle Mountain, Nev.

Dr. Sahra Sedigh, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, with Drs. Filippo Bastianini and Nestore Galati, researchers at UMR's Center for Infrastructure Engineering Studies, have developed an autonomous structural health monitoring device that can be retrofitted to an existing bridge. The system, which can also detect flooding, uses the cellular phone infrastructure to report data and generate alerts. It costs one to two orders of magnitude less than comparable solutions and eliminates the need for visual inspection or site visits.

If the Missouri Department of Transportation improved its sources of biodiesel, the department would be able to meet a state mandate that calls for fueling at least 75 percent of its diesel fleet and heavy equipment with biodiesel. That suggestion is part of a list of best practices being developed for MoDOT by a University of Missouri-Rolla researcher.

Members of UMR's Engineers Without Borders chapter discuss their recent trips to Guatemala and Bolivia.

Dr. Mehdi Ferdowsi, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMR, talks about how vehicle fleets could be used to help improve the nation's power grid. Ferdowsi envisions a future where hybrid cars, not currently driving, could be plugged into the power grid and used to help regulate power and stabilize energy prices.

This week are talking with members of UMR's ChemE Car Team about how they are using hydrochloric acid, and a little magnesium, to power a car to nationals. The team will compete this fall in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's the second consecutive year the team has qualified for the national competition.

Stuart Salvador of St. Louis is a senior currently attending both the University of Missouri-St. Louis and UMR, where he is majoring in mechanical engineering with a minor in history. Stuart has an OURE project with Diana Ahmad. The goal of the project is to cast new light on the accomplishments of Adolph Sutro, in particular the development of the Sutro Tunnel. The Sutro Tunnel at Nevada's Comstock Lode was a major feat of engineering that changed the face of the mining industry. The mining hazards Sutro helped mitigate were lethal gas inhalation, contraction of illnesses, drowning and physical injury, and various afflictions and conditions caused by overheating from the hot, stagnant air of the mine shafts.

Dr. Diana Ahmad, associate professor of history and political science and UMR archivist, came to UMR in 2000. Ahmad is the author of numerous publications and book reviews and presentations at the international, national and regional level. In her latest book, "The Opium Debate," UMR historian Diana Ahmad examines how the spread of opium-smoking fueled racism and created demands for the removal of the Chinese from American life. Although China faced its own epidemic of opium addiction, only a very small minority of Chinese immigrants in America were actually involved in the opium business. In the book, which will be released this month, she describes the disparities between Anglo-American perceptions of Chinese immigrants and the somber realities of these people's lives.

Today's guests are Daniel Taurtiz, assistant professor of computer science, and two OURE students, Laura Woodard of Rolla, a senior in computer science with a double minor in mathematics and psychology, and Kristen Loesch of St. Louis, a senior in computer science.

Where in the world will the next generation of computer science graduates come from. That's the question two University of Missouri-Rolla students are trying to answer through a computer game they're devising to get younger students, especially girls, interested in computer science.

Research has shown that middle school is the time frame when boys and girls form their opinions about math and science. A negative opinion could set them on a path away from a future in computer sciences.

More information about the project is online at web.umr.edu/~tauritzd/creu/.

UMR student Ben Roodman is putting a new spin on the idea with the launch of ImThere, a social networking service that integrates the Internet with cellular telephone technology.

Roodman, a senior computer engineering major from Chesterfield, Mo., is the CEO of ImThere, which could become the MySpace of the mobile world. It's a social networking service that connects subscribers to information about events such as concerts, CD launch parties or indie film festivals via text messages over their cell phones.

GuruLib is an online cataloging service created by Rana Basheer, a Ph.D. student in computer engineering at UMR, and his wife, Christina Leung. Built around a program that searches hundreds of online databases, the website helps people organize their personal libraries by retrieving information about their books, CDs, DVDs, video grames or software. The "virtual bookshelf" uses more than 530 public and university libraries around the world as well as six Amazon.com servers to retrieve the information.

During a recent visit to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, a UMR research team was informed that they have won the Air Force Research Laboratory Munitions Directorate (AFRL/MN) nationwide "Campus Challenge II" competition to develop ideas for such a technology. Last year, UMR learned it was one of two finalists chosen to prepare a technology roadmap for the AFRL/MN. The other finalist was the California Institute of Technology.

UMR's development plan was judged to be the best in the competition, and now, with the official backing of the AFRL/MN, the UMR team will move ahead with plans for further research.

Dr. Fatih Dogan, a professor of materials science and engineering at UMR, is leading the Rolla-based effort. He says the Munitions Directorate, which is developing systems with electrical requirements that can exceed the capabilities of known power sources, is looking for a new source of compact power to replace conventional energy systems like batteries.

The new bio-inspired energy sources, which will be compact, lightweight and extremely long-lasting, are expected to be used to power unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous terrestrial micro-robots, artificial intelligence systems and other military devices.

His findings, along with co-author Barry Popik's material, are the subject of a new book, "Studies in Slang VII." The 194-page book consists of 24 articles that reat a range of U.S. slang, covering everything from "hashhouse" lingo to the origin of Chicago's nickname as "The Windy City."

In early 2004, officials in Washington, D.C., a city whose water district had recently switched to monochloramine as a disinfectant, discovered abnormally high levels of lead in several homes across the city -- some as high as 48,000 parts per billion (ppb). The Environmental Protection Agency stipulates an action limit of 15 ppb of lead for drinking water to be safe.

The rise in lead levels appeared to coincide with the water district's switch from the use of free chlorine to the use monochloramine to treat the city's water. This coincidence led researchers to explore its affect on lead in drinking water.

By 2015, drivers may be less concerned about gas mileage than about hydrogen storage. By 2030, the United States' dependency on foreign oil to power our cars and trucks could be a thing of the past.

A few years later, homeowners might be able to drop off the grid, generating their own power from in-house fuel cells and leaving behind nothing but clean, potable water.

Yangchuan Xing, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, is working to bring these possibilities into reality using polymer electrolyte membrane or PEM fuel cells.

Current legislation requires gasoline in Missouri to be 10 percent ethanol, an alternate fuel derived from corn. Current ethanol production methods yield just a little more fuel than it takes to produce it.

To meet the increased demand, ethanol plants must increase those yields. UMR civil engineers Joel Burken and Mark Fitch are working with UMR biologist Melanie Mormile to improve the efficiency of ethanol production by using the left-over biomass that now goes to waste.

Dr. David Summers, Curators' Professor of mining engineering at UMR, and Dr. Dev Niyogi, assistant professor of biological sciences at UMR, have joined forces to create crude oil easily and inexpensively in just a few hours by extracting the oil from algae grown in an underground mine.

Typical algae are about 25 percent oil, which makes their capacity to yield transportation fuel greater than corn or soybeans. Now all the pair has to do is figure out the most efficient method to extract the oil.

UMR engineering management students served up marketing advice this spring to Angie and Kevin Britton, owners of the Huddle House restaurants in Rolla and Cuba, Mo.

UMR students enrolled in "Marketing Management" mixed textbook concepts with reality as they gathered market intelligence, analyzed consumer behavior, and planned promotions for the new Huddle House, a franchise that operates mostly in the southern and eastern parts of the country.

The six undergraduate students are enrolled this semester in a capstone course with Dr. Bill Ankner, executive director of the Missouri Transportation Institute, which is housed in Rolla. The class' assignment was to develop a business plan for a new commuter bus system, which will help officials determine the best way to run the service from Fort Leonard Wood to Rolla and Lebanon.

Today's guests include Tim Assel of Cameron, Mo., a senior in aerospace engineering; Peter Cross of Ash Grove, Mo., a graduate student in aerospace engineering; and Paul Leonard of Ballwin, Mo., a senior in mechanical engineering.

The UMR First Responder Design Team beat out Georgia Institute of Technology and several other universities to capture the first-place finish. The prize money will be used to refine and build the team's design for an unmanned aerial vehicle with vertical takeoff and landing capabilities.

The team's design -- nicknamed Project SAVER because it's a semi-autonomous VTOL emergency responder -- is a coaxial, contra-rotating blade helicopter featuring a side-mounted camera.

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UMR students enrolled in "International Engineering and Design" and "Women as Global Leaders" classes will travel to the highlands of Guatemala March 25-31.

"The spring break trip is an interdisciplinary academic pursuit," says Dr. Curt Elmore, an assistant professor of geological engineering who teaches the international engineering class. "Students will design, construct and install sustainable disinfection systems."

Students are currently testing water filters at UMR. They hope to be able to make additional filters in Guatemala.

"Previous trips to Guatemala have allowed us to identify some of the water problems, like fecal contamination, and now we're working on them," says Elmore, who has been leading UMR trips to Central America since 2002. "This year, we'll be taking our largest group to Guatemala."

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Today's guests include Dr. DJ Belarbi and Dr. Pedro Silva.

"We are in an earthquake-prone area close to the New Madrid fault line, the most active fault east of the Rockies," says team member Dr. D.J. Belarbi, Curators' Teaching Professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at UMR. "One of the nation's largest devastating earthquakes happened in this area in 1812. We know that the infrastructure in this area is prone to behave very badly if an earthquake hits."

When the columns that support the deck of bridges "are excited by an earthquake, they can undergo different types of loading -- twisting, pushing, bending -- all at the same time and in every direction," explains Dr. Ashraf Ayoub, assistant professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at UMR.

"One of the main outcomes of the research will be to better understand the response of bridges under earthquakes," says Dr. Pedro Silva, assistant professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at UMR. "There are some bridges that we know are not capable of withstanding an earthquake."

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Today's guests include Dr. Badrul Chowdhury and student Sushant Barave.

A University of Missouri-Rolla professor is developing techniques to improve power grid reliability and prevent cascading outages during disturbances.

"If we operate the power grid the way we've been operating it the last 40 years, we're going to have more failures," says Dr. Badrul Chowdhury, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UMR. "There's no question about it. Unless we have new technologies and innovative operating strategies, we're going to see a lot more outages and blackouts on the system."

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Today's guests include Dr. Chang-Soo Kim and Dr. Gary Gadbury.

Wake up. Prick your finger. Repeat daily for the rest of your life. That's a way of life for thousands of diabetics, and it's something Dr. Chang-Soo Kim, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri-Rolla, is trying to change.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Kim is developing a "smart" sensor that can provide continuous blood sugar monitoring for those living with diabetes, one of the most common and serious chronic diseases in the United States.

A researcher at the University of Missouri-Rolla is on the forefront of developing new statistical tools, ones that will help biologists and other scientists sort through massive amounts of data to find disease-causing genes.

For the past three years, Dr. Gary Gadbury, assistant professor of mathematics and statistics at UMR, has worked with a team of researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham to develop methods to analyze "microarray" data.

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Inefficient, unproductive meetings -- like those satirized in Scott Adams' Dilbert cartoon -- are the bane of the modern workplace, but two University of Missouri-Rolla professors are looking to reverse that with new software to help people share ideas and stick to an agenda. Today's guests include Dr. Ray Luechtefeld and Dr. Steve Watkins.

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Today's guests include Dr. CDTella Atekwana with student Caroline Davis and Dr. Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe with student Stacey Story.

Dr. CDTella Atekwanas search for evidence of past life has taken her all the way back to the place where humanity began. Atekwana, a bio-geophysicist, is an expert at reading signatures that biological organisms leave in rocks. By studying the changes in the rocks over time how micro-bacterial activity has changed the character of rock Atekwana hopes to gather indirect evidence of past and present life. That evidence helps her understand how the geology has changed over time at places like the East African Rift System.

If evidence of past life is ever discovered on Mars, chances are a microfossil hunter like Dr. Francisca Oboh-Ikuenobe will be involved. The path to such a discovery begins on Earth in remote places like Western Australia, where Oboh-Ikuenobe conducted field tests on the geomicrobiology of ephemeral salt lakes this past summer.

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Today's guests include Dr. Shari Dunn-Norman and Dr. Charles Morris.

Like some of the levees in New Orleans, much of the oil producing infrastructure in the Gulf of Mexico wasnt built to withstand a hurricane as powerful as Katrina, according to a petroleum engineering expert at the University of Missouri-Rolla. But its not the damage to production platforms and rigs in the Gulf of Mexico or damage to the refineries on the mainland that most worry Dr. Shari Dunn-Norman, an associate professor of geological and petroleum engineering at UMR. She's concerned about the damage to the sub-sea pipelines that carry crude oil and natural gas from the gulf to the refineries. ]]> http://podcast.mst.edu/technofiles.rss http://podcast.mst.edu/2005/TechnoFilesAug2005.mp3 Fri, 19 Aug 2005 08:00:00 CDT 35:49 solar, house, decathlon, washington, energy KMST - TechnoFiles with Wayne Huebner Podcasts

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Today's guests include UMR Solar House Team members Joel Lamsonand Natalie McDonald and Jeff Birt, one of the team's advisors.

The way things are going, the American Dream might soon be to own your own solar house -- one that's capable of charging your own electric car. Students at the University of Missouri-Rolla have built such a house and they're working on another.

Members of the UMR Solar House Team are putting the final touches on a new house, which will be entered in the 2005 Solar Decathlon Oct. 7-16 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

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As NASA prepares the Discovery shuttle for blast-off, this eight-member team is prepping itself for its own flight mission set for July 21-30 in Houston. The eight-member team is one of 20 NASA has selected from more than 100 proposals to conduct reduced-gravity experiments this summer aboard the agency's famous "Weightless Wonder" aircraft. Listen as team members and their advisor, Dr. Hank Pernicka, discuss their efforts to improve construction in space with their welding experiment.

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Today's guests include Dr. Massimo Bertino and Dr. Jee-Ching Wang.

Led by Dr. Massimo F. Bertino, a UMR research team is creating quantum dots via photolithography. It's a first that could write a new chapter in the field of micro-computing.

Dr. Jee-Ching Wang received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation to support his work on modeling nanoparticle self-assembly. Wang will receive $400,000 from the NSF over the course of five years to investigate at the atomic scale how nanoparticles self-assemble. The research will help bring the nanotechnology community one step closer to manufacturing miniature, high-performance devices.

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Kylee Hyzer, a sophomore from Joilet, Ill., and Kyle Anderson, a senior from California, Mo., are using what they call "green chemistry" to turn soybean oil into an environmentally friendly, renewable paint for trafficways. Unlike current acrylic paints, the soybean paint is produced without any waste in a one-step, one-pot process. Today's guests include Hyzer, Anderson and Dr. Harvest Collier. ]]> http://podcast.mst.edu/technofiles.rss http://podcast.mst.edu/2005/TechnoFilesApril2005.mp3 Fri, 15 Apr 2005 08:00:00 CDT 46:43 general, motors, customer, satisfaction, solar, car, race KMST - TechnoFiles with Wayne Huebner Podcasts

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Today's guests include Dr. Ken Ragsdell with students Vivek Jikar and Elizabeth Cudney, and members of the UMR Solar Car Team, including Stephanie Maiden, Dan Riley and John Tyler.

A new technique to relate a vehicle's technical performance with customer satisfaction may save General Motors significant time and cost and may lead to better product decisions, according to University of Missouri-Rolla researchers. Ragsdell and two graduate students will spend this year creating a methodology for GM product developers to use to determine what adjustments should be made during the development process to most economically meet new customer perceptions and what impact a supplier's performance characteristics has on customer satisfaction.

UMR Solar Car Team members are working to improve the aerodynamics of Solar Miner V, and they have designed a modified chassis that can withstand the rigors of the road. In 2003, though it won the American Solar Challenge, Solar Miner IV had trouble with a cracked chassis.

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Today's guests include Dr. Von Richards and members of the UMR Formula SAE Team, including Dr. Hank Pernicka, Nic Langford, Valarie Boatman and Aaron Young.

UMR has been a leader for years in the research of lost foam casting, a metal casting process that produces castings with foam patterns. Richards' research is taking lost foam casting to a new level by using the technique on various types of steels, including carbon, low alloy and stainless.

Despite never winning a national championship, and despite the grueling schedule of building a new car from scratch every year while some other teams take two or even three years to complete a project, the Formula SAE Team is by far the most popular student design team on campus. After its No. 4 finish in last May's Formula SAE event, the team is certain to attract even more interest among UMR students who want to get their hands dirty.

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Today's guests include Dr. Genda Chen and Dr. J. David Rogers.

A new sensor system being developed by Chen at UMR may help get rescue personnel to the scene faster the next time a tornado or terrorist damages a bridge or other structure because of its ability to "memorize" the location of the damage.

New Madrid earthquake packs a more powerful punch than a California quake of the same magnitude, Rogers says. The geology in the New Madrid region, mainly bluffs made of hard rock like limestone and river bottoms filled with soft clay or sand, essentially increases the power of an earthquake.

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Today's guests include Dr. Jason Baird and Braden Lusk.

Baird and his team of researchers are developing the technology necessary to make buildings blast-resistant. In a related project with Kontek, they have created steel-reinforced concrete barriers that link to form a barricade that can resist a 200-pound trinitrotoluene (TNT) blast, followed by the impact of a 20,000-pound truck traveling at 50 miles per hour, says Baird.

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Today's guests include Dr. Richard Brow, Brad Tischendorf and Laxmikanth Peddi.

All three guests received research awards from the American Ceramic Society during the fall 2004 meeting of the Glass and Optical Materials Division of the American Ceramic Society.

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Today's guests include Dr. Daryl Beetner and Dr. Todd Hubing.

An improvised explosive device (IED), often rigged to detonate from a distance, may be the most common casualty producing weapon in Iraq, but if it uses a radio receiver, it could also be one of the easiest to override, say UMR researchers.

Radio receivers, such as those found in remote-controlled toys, wireless phones, cell phones, and wireless doorbells, are cheap, readily available devices that are often used to initiate the explosion in an IED. Hubing, Beetner and other researchers in the UMR Electromagnetic Compatibility Laboratory are internationally recognized for their ability to track down the sources of unintentional noise in electronic systems for the purpose of minimizing radio frequency emissions. They are now using some of those same tools to detect and identify radio receivers.

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Today's guests include Dr. Robert Aronstam and Dr. Roger Brown.

The cDNA Resource Center, new to UMR this fall, offers nearly 900 full-length cDNA clones of human signaling proteins. This service allows scientists to focus on basic biological questions without spending excessive amounts of time in procuring, preparing or verifying their own.

Brown is leading research into how glass can be implanted in the human body to cause bone to form.

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Today's guests include Dr. Paula Lutz and Dr. Dan Forciniti.

Lead-based paint, which tastes sweet like sugar, was banned for household use in 1978 but can be found in thousands of housing units in St. Louis and an CDTimated 57 million homes across the country.

Children are at a higher risk for lead poisoning than adults, says Lutz, who has been researching the effects of lead exposure on children's immune systems for the past decade. She began the first phase of her work in Springfield, Mo., but has partnered with the St. Louis city health department for the second phase.

For the past eight years, UMR researchers, led by Forciniti, have been investigating how and why proteins, particularly those present in human plasma, adsorb in solid surfaces. Their findings may one day help scientists eliminate surface-induced thrombus formation, a phenomenon known to cause blood clots in artificial arteries, valves and veins.

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Today's guests include Dr. Delbert Day and Dr. David Riggins.

As NASA continues to focus on sending explorers to Mars, two UMR scientists are working on ways to house the astronauts when they arrive on the red planet by building with martian minerals.

Dr. Dave Riggins helped evaluate and optimize the X-43A vehicle's engine flow path through computer simulation and analysis over the past 10 years. The X-43A has been designed to fly at Mach 7, which is seven times the speed of sound and far faster than any previous air-breathing aircraft.

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There is important research going on in the ceramic engineering department at UMR that could affect the next generation of reusable space vehicles. Wayne Huebner talks with Dr. Bill Farenholz and Dr. Greg Hilmas about it.

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Today's guests include Dr. Harlan Anderson and members of the Hydrogen Fueling Station Team.

UMR researchers have been leaders in fuel cell technology for more than a decade. Anderson is leading a three-year fuel cell research project, partially funded by a $2.8 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The goal is to develop a cheaper, more efficient solid oxide fuel cell that burns at a cooler temperature.

UMR's Hydrogen Fueling Station Team participated in the first University Student Hydrogen Design Contest: Hydrogen Fueling Station during the 15th Annual U.S. Hydrogen Conference and Hydrogen Expo USA on April 26-30 at the Hollywood Renaissance Hotel in Los Angeles, Calif.

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Today's guests include Dr. Melanie Mormile and Dr. Phil Whitefield.

What do a lake in Washington state and the planet Mars have in common? That's what UMR biologist Melanie Mormile is trying to find out. Early data from the Mars rover "Opportunity" suggest the red planet was once home to saline lakes, much like Soap Lake in Washington state. Soap Lake's high salt content, in addition to its high alkaline pH, make it inhospitable for most living organisms.

For the past decade, Philip Whitefield has been studying aerosols produced by aerospace activities, such as aircraft operations and rocket launchings.

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Today's guests include Dr. Anne Maglia and Dr. Jennifer Leopold.

Dissecting frogs online is an everyday experience for two researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla.

Biologist Dr. Anne Maglia and computer scientist Dr. Jennifer Leopold are the creators of MorphologyNet, a web-based library of 3-D reconstructions of animal anatomy. Currently the site houses images of frogs only, which is Maglia's specialty. But by May 1 of next year, the site will include images of turtles, humans, salamanders, birds and fish.

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Today's guests include Dr. Michael Meagher and Dr. Larry Gragg, both from the UMR History department. Listen as they talk about some interesting research on how politicians, specifically presidents, use fear to manipulate public opinion.

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Today's guests include Dr. Mohammad Qureshi and Gary Green.

Mohammad Qureshi makes a career out of studying the daily grind on our nation's roads and highways, and is finding ways to make them smoother, both physically and conceptually.

The spacious, three-story structures lab in UMR's Butler-Carlton Hall gives Gary Greene ample room to conduct some research with a twist. The UMR Ph.D. student is using the roomy facility to simulate an earthquake's twisting movements on a 48-foot reinforced hollow concrete box girder to see how an earthquake might affect highway bridges in Missouri.

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Today's guests include Dr. Donald Wunsch and Dr. Jay Switzer.

In the late 1980s, the neural network community became extremely excited about a highly studied and long-standing problem -- the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP). According to Wunsch, the TSP is this: You need to visit all the cities in a set location so that the distance you cover overall is the shortest, and you end up where you started. The TSP maps to real-world problems, such as circuit board layout, airline routing, job shop scheduling and the manufacturing environment.

Chemists at the University of Missouri-Rolla have developed a new process that could be used to sort biologically potent, useful chemicals from their less useful and sometimes toxic counterparts in a way that is less expensive and more widely applicable.

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Today's guests include Dr. Ming Leu and Dr. Rajiv Mishra with Marty Rust.

Leu's research projects include developing a virtual-reality environment to help first responders train for terrorist attacks, virtual sculpting and virtual bone surgery, assembly operation and numerical control machining simulation, and using ice to build rapid prototyping models.

Researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla are patenting a process that makes metal stronger, more efficient and more cost effective -- by making it flow like chewing gum. The result could be manufacturing improvements for the aircraft industry.

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Today's guests include Jim Taylor with members of the mine rescue teams and mucking teams and Leslie Gertsch.

Mine rescues are serious business, and mining industry professionals make sure they are prepared for disasters. But so do mining engineering students at the University of Missouri-Rolla.

A mine rescue team from UMR -- the only university to have such a team -- will compete in the annual Mine Rescue Contest Oct. 6-8 at UMR's Experimental Mine on Bridge School Road in Rolla.

Researchers at UMR are making road maps for mining and mill operations by developing guidelines to increase efficiency, productivity and communication. This work could result in significant energy savings for the U.S. mining industry.

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Today's guests include Dr. Stuart Bauer with Corry Hailey and Amy Schneider and Dr. Joel Burken.

Bauer, Hailey and Schneider comprised one of few college and university teams across the nation chosen by the U.S. Department of Energy to participate in a 10-week research program, known as FaST (Faculty and Student Teams).

Burken's studies on how trees can help clean up the environment has received a $270,000 boost from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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Today's guests include Dr. Akira Tokuhiro and Dr. Bruce McMillin with Dr. Dr. Mariesa Crow.

At UMR's nuclear reactor, faculty and staff are using their faces instead of keys to gain access to secured areas. The face-recognition technology being used at the UMR reactor is an evaluation in security that could help aid the nation's security concerns.

UMR researchers developing ways to protect power systems from overloads may also be developing a system to thwart terrorist threats to the nation's power grid.

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Today's guests include Dr. Steve Pekarek, Nick Benavides and Ryan Thornton.

Pekarek and Benavides talk about fuel cells and their use on distributed energy systems. Thornton discusses his role in the development of the UMR Solar House. ]]> http://podcast.mst.edu/technofiles.rss http://podcast.mst.edu/2003/TechnoFilesJuly2003.mp3 Fri, 18 Jul 2003 08:00:00 CDT 16:48 clean, energy, solar, car, races KMST - TechnoFiles with Wayne Huebner Podcasts

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Today's guests include Dr. Larry Grayson and Kerry Poppa.

Grayson discusses the "clean energy" activities on the UMR campus. Poppa shares more about the UMR Solar Car Team. ]]> http://podcast.mst.edu/technofiles.rss