Passive buildings, especially passive houses, are built to use as close to no energy as possible for heating and cooling. It’s a nifty idea if you can make it work and some people are.

Careful design and construction are what make passive houses work. Careful siting in relation to the sun. Super-thick and super-efficient insulation. Tight-fitting, energy-efficient windows. Construction that essentially eliminates air moving into or out of the structure. When it’s done right, passive houses use essentially no energy to stay comfortable in winter, as much as 90 percent less than houses built to conventional code standards. Many passive houses are built with no central heating at all.

There’s one big drawback to passive houses. They’re expensive to build, mostly because of specialized construction materials and additional work during construction. Passive houses also need special household appliances, like clothes dryers that don’t vent to the outside. You’d begin getting the payback from lower energy bills right away, but it’s still a lot of money.

If passive buildings are a good idea, we’re running behind. About 25,000 certified passive buildings have been built in Europe. We’ve built about a dozen with more on the way.

Our house isn’t passive, but it’s still time to finish up here and go home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion:

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/business/energy-environment/26smart.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_solar_building_design

http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PassiveHouseInfo.html

When someone mentions ancient Rome, what comes into your mind? Gladiators in the Coliseum, maybe. Engineers are likely to think about water. Roman engineers did amazing things with water.

Let’s start with simply getting water to the city. They built aqueducts, elevated stone-and-concrete troughs that carried water into the city. Eleven of them over about 500 years. The longest carried water almost 60 miles. Then they passed the water through a system of purification and settling tanks.

From there, the water went to 1,300 public fountains and basins where residents could get water for free. There were 11 huge imperial baths, plus more than 850 free or inexpensive public baths. Then the water went into a network of underground sewers that carried the wastewater to the Tiber River.

This probably seemed pretty simple, and for the 21st century, it is. But 2,000 years ago, it was far ahead of any city in the world. In fact, historians say this water is probably what allowed Rome to grow to a metropolis of at least a million people. At that time, this made Rome the biggest city in the world. It was still dirty and unsanitary by modern standards, but it was far ahead of anyplace else at the time.

Our water comes out of a tap instead of an aqueduct, but we’re still glad to have it. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: With all the marvelous stuff engineers are turning out today, it’s sometimes hard to remember that engineers have been around a long time and they’ve been doing neat stuff all that time. What do you think are the coolest thing ancient engineers did?

For more:

http://tinyurl.com/2aeof6z

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/waters/

http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/rome/

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is actually two tunnels, each more than 30 feet in diameter and more than 35 miles long. It’s the longest tunnel ever built. Drilling began in 1996 and when it opens, probably in 2016 or 2017, it will carry part of a high-speed rail link between Zurich, Switzerland, and Milan, Italy. Engineering experts say it’s the biggest and most complicated construction project since the Panama Canal.

Here are some of the details.

To get to this point, eight huge drilling machines chewed out 23 million tons of rock. On a good day each of them got through about 130 feet. To help work move faster, a half-mile-deep shaft was sunk from the surface at the tunnel’s half-way point. From there, engineers drilled toward each end.

It wasn’t always easy. Unstable rock forced them to relocate an emergency shelter. And at one point, one of the drilling machines was buried by rock falling from the tunnel roof and stalled for six months.

Trains using the two tunnels will travel at almost 150 miles per hour. It will cut travel time from Zurich to Milan almost in half, to two and a half hours. That’s faster than flying.

Our way home is on the surface, and that’s fine with us. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by K-A-M-U F-M in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Construction projects like these tunnels under the Alps are always impressive. It’s interesting that once the train service gets under way, it’ll be faster to travel from Zurich to Milan by train than to fly.

For more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,723202,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6471241.stm

If you live in the United States, as most of us do, water’s not a big deal. Turn on the tap and there it is. Sometimes, like the last couple of years in Texas, watering the lawn in the summer got a little expensive, but the water was there.

If you look at the Earth from space, it looks like we have plenty of water. And we do. The problem is that most of it doesn’t do us any good. Here are some facts and numbers to think about.

Only about two-and-a-half-percent of all the water on earth is fresh, the kind we can drink. The rest is salty. And two-thirds of that is frozen in arctic and Antarctic ice caps and glaciers. Almost all of what’s left is buried in deep underground aquifers, rock formations – some a half-mile down – that hold water like other formations hold oil. Here’s a kind of scary number: only about three-gallons of every thousand-gallons of fresh water is on the surface, where we can get at it easily.

Many civil engineers spend their careers designing effective ways to store and purify water and move it from where it is to where it’s needed. It’s an occupation that’s only going to get more important as the earth’s population grows.

Our water’s dried up for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by K-A-M-U F-M in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.  http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Water is one of the most valuable natural resources we have, but nobody seems to notice. We can live without oil, but we can’t live without water. How will we get enough?

For more:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html

http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/#water

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper-Collins, 2010.

If you’ve been following high-tech news lately, you know that the folks that run Google are spending a ton of money to design software and sensor systems that aim to let you leave the driving to your car. Some of their cars have driven as far as a thousand miles on real highways and city streets without a driver’s help.

The take-home part may be what this kind of research is going to mean for drivers like us, next year or five years from now. It’s likely to be pretty cool.

Let’s start with new gear that will help us merge into freeway traffic. Other sensors will warn us if we’re running too close to the car ahead or nodding off at the wheel. Or how about cruise control that thinks for itself. It’ll slow down automatically if traffic slows. Or radar that looks ahead on foggy days to warn us of what’s ahead before we get close enough to see it.

All this stuff is coming. And we’re probably going to see some of this stuff, or all of it, in pieces long before the whole thing comes together in a car that drives itself.

However it happens, it’s going to be fun to see. And drive. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Some of this technology sounds a lot like what we called science fiction only a while ago. The big question: but can we trust it?

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=2&ref=science

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-11/google-robot-car-the-future-of-cruise-control-convoys-car-sharing/?om_rid=NrbmWv&om_mid=_BMtLxVB8VLz$Zb

When someone mentions green energy, stuff like wind turbines and solar panels, one place you’re not likely to think of is Italy. Think again. Small towns in Italy are showing the rest of us what can be done to use green technology to cut our energy bills. They’ve got motivation. Their electric rates are about three times what we pay in the United States.

More than 800 small towns and villages in Italy are investing in green energy and making it work. Consider the mountain village of Tocco, population 2,700. Tocco gets electricity from four wind turbines and an array of solar panels. The village doesn’t get its electricity directly from the turbines. The company that owns the turbines sells the electricity they produce to the national electric grid and Tocco gets a share of that price. Last year that paid for the village’s electric bill and produced a profit. About $200,000 worth.

The solar panels provide electricity to light the village cemetery and buildings. They produce a small profit, too.

Residents of the village are getting into it. Some of them are installing their own solar panels. It works for them, too. One new solar panel owner saw monthly electric bills drop from as much as $700 to zero.

Our electric bill is paid up, but it’s still time to wrap this up for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: This kind of stuff is pretty small stuff in the big picture, but it shows that wind and solar can work in the real world. Pretty cool.

For more:

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2010/10/07/tocco-italia-renewable-energy/

http://inhabitat.com/2010/09/30/ancient-italian-town-completely-powered-by-renewable-energy/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/science/earth/29fossil.html?_r=1

Hybrid cars are no big deal these days. You see them just about everywhere. Even the technology is getting familiar. A gasoline engine paired with an electric motor and a big battery. The important point is that they give you great gas mileage.

There’s another hybrid out there, and it gets better gas mileage than the gasoline-electric hybrids we see every day. A lot better. It’s a diesel–hydraulic hybrid. And diesel-hydraulic hybrids can cut the amount of fuel you use – in half.

In case you’re as technologically challenged as we are, hydraulic devices use fluids under pressure to multiply force. The hydraulic master cylinder in your car’s brake system multiplies the force of your foot on the brake pedal. In hydraulic hybrids, a small pump compresses hydraulic fluid in what’s called an accumulator to a pressure of 5,000 pounds per square inch. When you step on the accelerator, the pressurized fluid is released and turns a hydraulic motor. The closest thing to a gasoline-electric hybrid’s battery is one that stores electricity for things like the lights and radio.

So far, most of the research on hydraulic hybrids uses the system to drive big vehicles. Garbage trucks and UPS trucks and such. But it should work at least as well in passenger cars.

Our garbage truck is at the door and we’re going home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by K-A-M-U F-M in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Hydraulic hybrids sound like a great idea and an intriguing alternative to gasoline-electric hybrids. But there must be some downside to it. What am I not seeing?

For more:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hydraulic-hybrid-vehicle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_vehicle

http://www.hydraulicspneumatics.com/200/Issue/Article/False/38545/Issue

Usually, when we build nuclear power plants, we build them big. The largest nuclear plants produce more than 1,400 megawatts of electricity, enough power for about 1.5 million households. That could be changing. The Department of Energy is studying smaller power plants that would produce about 300 megawatts. Enough to power, say, Jackson, Mississippi. Other researchers are looking into power plants that could serve even smaller communities.

Experts estimate that a 50 megawatt reactor about the size of a garden shed could provide electricity for small towns or even individual work sites away from the power grid. Even better, these small reactors could be linked together as the town grows and electricity demand increases. There could be another benefit to these small power plants, too.

Since the generators would be located close to where the electricity is used, there would be less loss as it moves along transmission lines. Now, with large regional power plants, between four percent and 10 percent of electricity is lost before it gets to where it is used.

And there’s more. Odd as it sounds, people who live near a nuclear power plant are exposed to less radiation than if they live near a coal-fired plant. In either place, the amount of radiation is so small that there’s no real danger.

In any case, it’s going to be a few years before the first of these mini-reactors is built. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU- FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: nuclear energy is still a controversial idea, although it shouldn’t be. What do you think of spreading out nuclear generator plants like this? Let us know.

For more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304026.html

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_22/b4180020375312.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/06/10/10greenwire-company-calls-new-small-nuclear-reactor-a-game-45123.html

Today, Cahokia is nothing but a collection of big grass-covered mounds alongside the Mississippi River not far from Saint Louis.

A thousand years ago, it was the largest city in North America north of Mexico. The centerpiece of Cahokia is a huge mound that once had a temple on top of it. It’s the largest prehistoric construction project in North or South America.

The clay slab it’s built on is 954 feet long and 774 feet wide. The mound itself is 100 feet tall, and covers 14 cres. That’s larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

Here’s another way to understand how big this mound is. It contains about 22 million cubic feet of earth. If 30 people started carrying dirt for it in baskets weighing 55 pounds each — that’s about one-and-a-half cubic feet — and they each carried eight baskets a day, it would take 167 years. More than 14,600,000 basketfuls. If they used pickup trucks, it would have taken almost 230,000 loads.

Two things make this construction project special. First, the dirt the mound is made of is pretty unstable stuff. And it’s built on a flood plain, where it’s lasted through a thousand years of Mississippi River floods. Both of these things suggest people with specialized skills – engineers – were involved. A thousand years ago.

We’ve hauled all the words we can for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Just because something like Cahokia is really old doesn’t mean that the people who built it didn’t know what they were doing. We’re always looking for nifty old construction projects: if you think of one, let us know.

For more:

http://bit.ly/asTghd

http://cahokiamounds.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia

It takes a lot of information to drill an oil well. And some of it’s pretty hard to come by. Starting is easy. GPS tells you where you are. Once you get underground, it gets complicated quickly. Oil and natural gas are a long way underground. Sometimes three-miles or so. And GPS doesn’t work underground.

In the early oil wells, sometimes drillers would lower a compass on a cord down the well pipe and take a picture of it with a camera to figure out what direction the drill was going. Things are better now. Now, sophisticated sensing tools often ride the drill pipe right behind the churning bit and pass information back up the pipe in real time.

Some sensors measure natural radiation emitted by the rock. Others tap into the electrical resistance of fluids in the rock. Another that’s sort of like MRI machines in hospitals detects the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Together, they can tell drillers whether they’re drilling through sand or rock, whether the formation contains oil, gas or water, and how easily the oil will flow out of the rock.

All this high-tech equipment is expensive. And knowing about it helps to explain why oil is so expensive these days.

We’ve done the drilling we can handle and we’re calling it quits for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.  http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Oil may not be the ultimate fuel to run our technological world, but for right now it’s what there is. The difficulty of getting to it helps explain its high cost.

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/science/06drill.html

http://www.elsandcompany.com/howdrillingworks.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/oil-drilling4.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_well

Cars and trucks have been getting safer for years. Seat belts. Airbags. Safety cages. Crumple zones. All kinds of technology that helps us survive a car crash. It works pretty well, but not well enough. More than 40,000 of us still die every year in vehicle accidents.

Now, automotive engineers and safety experts are looking in a different direction to keep us safe on the highway. How about simply avoiding the crash? That’s even safer than trying to make sure we don’t get hurt too badly.

Using technology to prevent highway accidents is an idea that’s catching on with engineers around the world. Sweden, Germany, Japan. And the United States, of course.

One idea is the smart highway. The smart highway would combine sensors at street or highway intersections with computer processors, GPS units and radio receivers in each car. The sensors would sort of watch the traffic and send the information to cars on streets nearby.

If the sensors saw an accident getting ready to happen, like a car getting ready to run a red light, they would send the information to cars that might get involved. The cars’ onboard systems could sound an alarm for drivers. Or even stomp on the brakes in real emergencies.

There’s no emergency here, so we’re going to shut it down and go home. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: We think that technology like this could have a big impact on highway safety. Two questions, though: will people be willing to pay for it? This kind of tech isn’t cheap. And should we?

Learn more:

http://abcnews.go.com/Travel/technology-reduces-severity-car-crashes-fatalities-injuries/story?id=8523234

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=1689610&tag=1

http://www.prevent-ip.org/download/Events/20050601%20ITS%20Hannover%20papers/22955.pdf

Science fiction has always been full of nifty gadgets that would almost work in real life. Almost, but not quite. Put away your skeptical hat. Engineers are turning some of these far-out gadgets into reality.

How about a jacket that uses your body heat to charge your cell phone? Or a tiny power plant that uses the heat from your apartment to light your living room?

These science fiction-sounding items are theoretically possible. They use something called the thermoelectric effect to turn heat into electricity and electricity into heat. In the past these gadgets have been too inefficient and too expensive to be worth developing. That’s changing as the cost of energy gets higher.

Now, engineers are using nanotechnology to pull off this heat-into-electricity-into-heat trick. They start with a high-tech alloy, bismuth antimony telluride, and crush it into really tiny particles. You could line up a-thousand of them across the end of a human hair. Then they press it into a wire or tape.

What’s important here is that these new wires conduct electricity with almost no heat. This is what makes thermoelectric devices practical.

The engineers working on this new generation of thermoelectric devices are looking ahead to a time when thermoelectric coolers will replace refrigerators and thermoelectric power generators will be standard equipment for any green house.

Thermoelectric or not, our effect is running down. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Some things, like interchangeable heat and electricity, used to be something you’d only see in science fiction. Now, physicists understand that it does work that way, and soon you and I may be using it. What kinds of application might use this phenomenon?

For more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_effect

http://newenergyandfuel.com/http:/newenergyandfuel/com/2008/03/25/what%E2%80%99s-that-thermoelectric-effect-and-why-is-it-so-important-now/

http://technologywonk.com/2007/giant-thermoelectric-effect-in-graphene/

When the Apollo astronauts were on the moon, they only stayed a few days at a time, and batteries or fuel cells did them just fine. But now NASA is talking about astronauts staying for weeks or months. Batteries just won’t do it. They’re going to need a long-term source of power for their exploration and scientific activities.

Space experts are proposing all sorts of power sources, from solar panels to king-sized fuel cells. One of most popular ideas is a small nuclear reactor.

NASA engineers are working on an ultra-compact nuclear power plant that should generate enough electricity to run an average American house. Or a lunar exploration base. And do it for eight years. Or longer. The reactor itself is about the size of a big wastebasket. The whole thing would fit into an 18-wheel trailer with room to spare and would weigh about the same as an armored Humvee.

Not everybody is convinced sending a nuclear reactor to the moon is a good idea. Protestors objected to launching NASA’s 1997 Cassini probe, which carried 72 pounds of plutonium fuel. But the NASA engineers are convinced the lunar reactor is safe.

Our reactor is still powered up, but it’s time to go. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Power — enough to keep life support and research systems running for a long time — is one of the most important puzzles engineers will have to solve if we’re going to stay on the moon. Compact nuclear power seems like a workable way to do it. What do you think?

Learn more:

http://shiftboston.blogspot.com/2010/03/moon-colony.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3161695.stm

http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/home/why_moon.html

The next time you see a butterfly flutter by, take a moment to notice the colors on its wings. They’re some of the most vivid colors you’ll ever see. No matter how carefully we print images of butterflies, the colors are never quite the same.

There’s a reason, and it’s an odd one. Those butterfly wing colors are not like other colors. Unlike paint or ink or most other things that produce colors, butterfly wings have no pigments. Pigments are the stuff in paint or ink that reflect light that we see as different colors. Instead, the surfaces of the wings are made up of microscopic structures that would look like the inside of egg cartons if you could see them. The way light reflects from different layers gives us butterfly wings’ intense colors.

The researchers have figured out how to assemble their own butterfly wing colors by putting together layers of material, sometimes only atoms thick.

There is a reason for this. It may give a new tool to people who need to keep forgers from making counterfeit versions of paper money or credit cards. It’s not that hard to match color pigments, but duplicating the tiny holes and bumps would be really difficult.

We’re not as colorful as a butterfly wing, so we’re going home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Engineers are using inspiration from nature more and more: biomimitics. This isn’t quite the same – or is it? Let us know what you think.

Learn more:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100530144025.htm

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/06/02/Bright-butterfly-wing-colors-duplicated/UPI-80731275501428/

http://www.physorg.com/news85033468.html

We’re used to high-tech materials. Lightweight composites. Superstrong adhesives. Polymers that shift shape on command. And it’s easy to think that coming up with new materials or changing old ones is something new. It’s not. Take latex, or rubber, for instance. Charles Goodyear invented the process we call vulcanization in 1839. Before that, rubber was sticky stuff that got soft in heat and stiff in cold. Goodyear’s process gave us the tough rubber that we use in everything from tires to rubber boots and rubber bands.

Goodyear’s process was important, but the Mayans in Central America were probably the first to understand how to change latex into more useful forms. And they did it hundreds of years before Goodyear. Mayans mixed latex with juice from the morning glory plant and got rubber that they used for all sorts of stuff. Rubber balls. Rubber bands. Rubber sandals. Rubber statues. Adhesives, glue.

The interesting part of this is that each of these things uses a different kind of rubber. Bouncy for balls. Tough for sandals. Sticky for adhesives. What they got depended on how much of morning glory juice they added to the raw liquid latex. But they did it and it worked.

We’ve done it for today and it’s time to bounce out of here. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: It’s useful to remember that sometimes even the most high-tech engineering has roots in “technology” that’s been around for hundreds or thousands of years. What other technologies got started long ago? We’d like to know what you think of, and we bet others would, too.

Learn more:

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/may/31/science/la-sci-rubber-20100531

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/mayaball-0524.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber

Engineers in Switzerland are getting ready for the first flight around the world in an electric-powered airplane. It’s pretty much the last word in high technology.

The plane looks like a sailplane on steroids. Its wingspan is wider than a Boeing 777, but it weighs about as much as an average car. It’s powered by four electric motors that run on electricity from big lithium-ion batteries that make up about a-quarter of the plane’s weight.

Those batteries are charged by almost 12,000 solar cells on the plane’s wings and tail surfaces. Really efficient. The electricity they produce is only enough to light about 200 small light bulbs. Picture that: flying around the world on the electricity it takes to light up a big Christmas tree.

The airplane’s skin is made from carbon fiber based on material used in the hull of the America’s Cup yacht, Alinghi . In some places it’s only a hundredth of a millimeter thick. That’s not much.

They plan to fly at altitudes between 26,000 and 30,000 feet. At night, when the sun isn’t shining, the motors will run on battery power and the plane will glide on thermal currents. They figure the trip will take about 36 hours in the air.

We’re not flying, but it’s still time for us to take off. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Things like this airplane, that push technology to the limit are fun. There must be other things like this that push technology. What are they? Let us know if you know.

Learn more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,699885,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-55783.html

http://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/04/features/the-solar-powered-flight-around-the-globe.aspx

http://www.solarimpulse.com/

Most of us have home computers these days, and they’re all connected to desktop printers. Hit the print key and out comes that report you needed for work or a barbecue sauce recipe from the web. Easy.

That was then. Now, a new kind of printer is taking printing into three-dimensions, not just flat on a piece of paper. These printers print out solid objects, usually in plastic. There aren’t many of the printers around yet. Technology geeks and hobbyists own most of them. They use them to make stuff like jewelry, toys, tools or kitchen appliances.

Tonight Show host and classic car collector Jay Leno even has one. His mechanics use it to print out car parts that they can’t buy any longer. They send the plastic models to machine shops to get real metal parts made, cheaper and faster than custom-designed parts.

The 3-D printers are starting to catch on. You can buy them in some electronics stores or directly from the manufacturers. Prices run from $750 for a desktop kit model to $27,000 for Leno’s refrigerator-sized unit. So far, it’s definitely a niche device, but enthusiasts are sure that someday we’ll be printing out things we need, not just fun stuff.

We can’t print out a ride home, but we’re still done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: These 3-D printers sound like they’d be a lot of fun, but can they really be useful? We’re not so sure. Let us know what you think.

Learn more:

http://www.statesman.com/business/technology/3-d-printers-go-beyond-paper-and-ink-729557.html?page=2&viewAsSinglePage=true

http://www.techshout.com/hardware/2007/09/3d-printers-that-can-create-objects-soon-to-be-available-for-use-at-home/

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/jay-leno/technology/4320759

If you like war movies or just keep track of the news from Iraq and Afghanistan, you know something about night vision devices. They’re goggles, mated to a set of lenses and electronic gear that allow soldiers to see in the dark. They work pretty well, but they’re bulky, heavy and expensive.

Now, materials engineers have come up with something that could replace current night vision technology. And it’s everything the current technology isn’t. Small, light and cheap.

Most standard night vision devices work by converting photons, the subatomic particles that make up light, into electrons that hit a phosphorous screen and produce an image you can see. Making this work requires lots of electric power and heavy glass components.

The new idea uses a detector made up of layers of an organic semiconductor connected to an LED array. The LED gives you an image you can see.

The best part is that the device is about the size of a nickel. And it can be made of plastic instead of glass. The researchers say adding it to a cell phone should be really inexpensive. It also could be added to eyeglasses or automobile windshields.

We can’t see in the dark yet, so we’re going to leave for home before the sun goes down. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: This seems like a nifty idea. How would you use a cell phone app that lets you see in the dark? Let us know.

Learn more:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100504113123.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_vision

Most of the time, the digital world seems like a good place to be. You can talk on your cell phone, text-message to friends and surf the web. All at the same time. While you’re walking down the street.

Do it sitting at your desk and we call it multi-tasking. You can write a report, write and answer e-mails, chat online, talk on the telephone.

Everybody’s multi-tasking, it seems. A college professor once described a student in a class he visited. She was listening to the lecturer, taking notes on her laptop, Googling words she didn’t know, and IM-ing with a friend. Taking good notes, too, he said. As you walk down the street, at least half the people you meet are talking on their cell phones as they walk.

Sometimes the sheer volume of data we get can overwhelm us. Have you ever overlooked an important e-mail because you were busy doing other things? We’ll bet you have. And researchers say that while we think it’s cool to multi-task, nobody actually does it very well. Even worse, behavioral scientists say living in the middle of all this data can be addictive. And it can actually get in the way of creativity and sound thinking.

We’re just single-tasking and we’re quitting for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Just because we can do more, should we? And what’s so great about being connected all the time? What do you think?

Learn more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?ref=science

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112334449

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2007/03/study-says-leave-the-multitasking-to-your-computer.ars

Nobody likes their morning and evening commutes. Even in small towns, people complain about the traffic. And they’re right. Across the country, we waste a lot of time sitting in our cars. Waiting. In its latest annual survey of traffic congestion, the Texas Transportation Institute found that every year traffic congestion costs each of us on the road more than $750. Almost a full work week’s time. Three week’s gas.

The goofy part is that simply building more roads doesn’t seem to help. It might even make it worse, some experts say. For instance, engineers who studied traffic in California found that if we add 10 percent to the capacity of the highways, nine-percent more traffic will show up to drive on it. In four years or less. The number of miles cars travel on roads and streets has grown four-times as fast as the population since the late 1960s.

What to do about it? Those experts are divided. Some say build more highways, but design them better. Others say we’d do better just to close down some lanes, make the highways smaller. Yet others suggest that we need to get real and recognize that towns and cities are going to be congested, but they don’t have to stay congested all day long.

The traffic’s building up outside, so we’d better leave. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Some of these ideas sound pretty goofy, but what we’re doing now doesn’t seem to work, either. What do you think?

Learn more:

http://www.forbes.com/2010/02/22/traffic-intersections-congestion-lifestyle-vehicles-traffic-jams.html

http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.html

http://mobility.tamu.edu/ums/

Those of us of a certain age remember when a launch from Cape Canaveral was exciting. Everything stopped so we could watch. Things are different now. The space program is still important, but budget deficits and different priorities threaten. And NASA’s not the only game in town anymore.

Private companies are pushing to take over pieces of what used to be NASA’s exclusive turf. Everything from building innovative inflatable space stations to developing rockets to put them into orbit. It’s too early to tell if space entrepreneurs like this are going to be able to carve out niches for themselves in space, but it seems to be working.

A small-scale inflatable space station is in orbit now around the earth. You can use the company’s onboard video system to check it out. And they have several other versions of the habitat ready to go. Almost.

Another company has used its own rocket to put a model of its own space vehicle into orbit. Other versions of the rocket, all the way to a massive three-engine heavy-lift rocket are on the drawing board.

These companies want to make space more accessible than it seems to when NASA was the only option. And they think they can do it as well as NASA and cheaper.

We’re going to launch for home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion:

Start the discussion: As long as there’s been spaceflight – at least in our lifetime, NASA has launched the rockets and sent humans into space. That seems to be changing, and we’re not sure it’s a bad thing. What do you think?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/04/AR2010060403360.html?sub=AR

http://www.spacex.com/

http://www.bigelowaerospace.com/

These days, everybody’s looking for new sources of electricity. All our portable electronics — iPods, cell phones, laptops — they all need good batteries to keep playing or talking or calculating. The batteries we have really aren’t that good. They’re not much better than the voltaic pile battery Alessandro Volta invented more than 200 years ago.

Engineering researchers are looking into a new power source. They’re looking, well, into themselves.
It’s pretty simple – and complicated, all at the same time. Imagine a small chip – called a biofuel cell – that uses sugar and oxygen to generate electricity. Now, imagine that biofuel cell is implanted in your arm. The oxygen and sugar is in your blood. Can you see it now? Electricity. It’s always there and always being recharged. Runing low on power? Grab a Coke or a candy bar.

The engineers really aren’t interested in a new way for you to power your iPod. Not yet, anyway. They’re looking for lightweight, compact, dependable ways for astronauts to power things like medical sensors in space. Now, they’re getting ready to send one up in a satellite to see how well it does in orbit. No people. Just tiny tanks of sugar and oxygen. The people will come later, they hope.

Well, our iPod sounds like it’s going flat. Guess we need to grab a Snickers bar. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: What do you think? If there was a way to use a biofuel cell to power your cell phone or iPod, would you get one? Let us know what you think.

Learn more:

http://www.physorg.com/news193470170.html

http://www.ecoseed.org/en/general-green-news/renewable-energy/biofuel/other-biofuel-technologies/7360-Living-batteries-Glucose-biofuel-cells-power-human-implants

http://www.psfk.com/2010/05/biofuel-cells-use-body-glucose-to-generate-electricity.html

Magnesium is nifty stuff. Pure magnesium is a silvery metal, and you probably remember from high school chemistry that it burns with a hot white flame.

While a lot of research has already gone into using hydrogen to store energy, either directly as a fuel or as part of fuel cell systems, some researchers think we should be looking at magnesium as a way to store energy. Magnesium stores about  10 times as much energy as hydrogen. And there’s enough magnesium in seawater to provide energy for 300,000 years.

Engineers at a Canadian company are working on a fuel cell that uses magnesium, air and water to produce electricity. An Israeli researcher has come up with a magnesium-based battery sort of like the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries we all know about. And a California researcher is working on a way to use magnesium to produce hydrogen for fuel.

All of this sounds good, but there’s a problem. It takes a lot of energy to purify magnesium to a form we can use. Maybe more than we’d get back. One researcher in Japan thinks he has the answer: solar energy to power a laser that would give us the almost 6,700° F. heat needed. We’ll see how that turns out.

Our magnesium power is somewhere in the future, so we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: What do you think about magnesium’s potential as a direct energy source or a way to store energy? We’d like to know, and we bet others would, too.

Learn more:

http://www.economist.com/node/15939644

http://www.physorg.com/news191259549.html

http://inventorspot.com/articles/japan_magnesium_energy_cycle_5887

If you live in Hong Kong and want to drive into the People’s Republic of China, you do have to switch. In Hong Kong, cars and trucks drive on the left side of the street. That’s because Hong Kong used to be a colony of Great Britain, where they drive on the left, too. But in the People’s Republic, they drive on the right, like most of the rest of the world.

You can see this might cause problems. Getting people driving back and forth to change lanes without a traffic jam or a big pileup. Engineers in Holland have come up with a solution. A nifty bridge over the Pearl River, which separates Hong Kong from the mainland.

On the bridge, the traffic lanes take a sort of figure-eight path so the lanes of traffic heading in one direction swoop over or under the lanes carrying cars and trucks from the opposite direction. When you get to the other side, you’re automatically in the proper lane.

Some critics say it would be cheaper and easier to build a simple double-decker bridge without all the swoops. But what do they know? This is way cool.

Anyway, traffic outside is running in our direction and we’re out of here. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: We know that there are simpler ways to build bridges that do what this one does. But is simpler always better? Let us know what you think.

Learn more:

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/9/view/10469/nl-architects-hong-kong-boundaries-crossing-facilities.html

http://www.archdaily.com/64354/pearl-river-necklace-nl-architects/

http://www.fastcompany.com/1660258/traffic-report-how-to-switch-to-the-other-side-of-the-road-without-causing-a-70-car-pileup

Just about everybody knows a little about internal combustion engines. They’re what powers almost all of our cars, trucks and motorcycles. They’ve been around for more than a hundred years, and they’re boring. They’re also really inefficient. Only about a quarter of the energy in fuel actually turns the wheels and takes us down the highway.

The rest, mostly heat, is just wasted. Engineers are looking into some nifty ways to get that wasted energy back.

One group of British engineers are working on a tiny turbine that would fit in the tailpipe. Exhaust from the engine would spin the turbine. It would drive a little electric generator that would go back to the battery to power the car’s electrical systems. This should cut fuel consumption by 15 percent, they say.

Other engineers are looking into what happens when they connect a flywheel to the transmission. When you hit the brakes, the flywheel collects energy from the wheels and stores it. If you need more power, the flywheel puts the energy back to the driveshaft. They say it’s more efficient than conventional hybrid cars.

There are a lot of pretty far out ideas out there, and some of them may actually work.

We’ve recovered about all the energy we’re going to, and we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Learn more:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18769-green-machine-rethinking-internal-combustion-engines.html

http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aaateb.htm

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/4261288

The ideas that grew into lasers have been around since some theorizing Albert Einstein did in 1916. But it was 1960 before the first one actually worked. Now lasers are everywhere. Laser printers. CD and DVD players. Barcode readers. And lots more.

In case you weren’t paying attention in physics class, a laser, for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, is what you get when you excite, or add energy to certain atoms. The atoms give off excited electrons which then emit photons, the stuff light is made of.

In a laser, these photons are all one wavelength, or color, and are coherent, or organized. They’re all moving the same direction at the same time. And they’re in a focused beam. Depending on what kind of atoms you start with, that beam can be just a pretty color or it can cut through a piece of steel.

Probably only computers have had a bigger technology impact on our lives than lasers. Doctors routinely use lasers to kill cancer cells and perform delicate eye surgery. Scientists move cells, bacteria and DNA with lasers. High-tech manufacturing makes precise cuts in wood and metal with lasers.

Our laser is excited, but it’s still time to go home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Learn more:

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/58499/title/Inventing_the_Light_Fantastic

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser

http://science.howstuffworks.com/laser.htm

This story of batteries starts in the West Texas town of Presidio, on the banks of the Rio Grande. Presidio is one of those West Texas towns that’s pretty far away from just about everything. It gets its electric power over one aging transmission line. 60-miles, across the rugged Davis Mountains from the equally small town of Marfa. Now and then, when storms blow through, that transmission line fails and Presidio goes dark. Even when the power’s on, current fluctuations knock computers offline and interfere with electrical appliances.

So the town got together with the electric transmission authorities and got a battery. A big one. Eighty 8,000-pound modules that store four megawatts of electricity. Enough to power the town for eight hours. The system also features sensors and switches to respond almost instantly to current fluctuations in addition to outages. This battery uses a little-known sodium-sulfur storage technology instead of better known systems like lithium-ion batteries.

The installation in Presidio is the fourth big battery system like it in the United States. If they work out, they may point the way toward large-scale storage that could even out the electrical highs and lows in a future power system that depends more on wind and solar energy than now.

Our battery is topped off, so we’re going to plug in and head out. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Learn more:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-4/texas-town-turns-monster-battery-backup-power

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/03/100325-presidio-texas-battery/

http://www.ettexas.com/projects/docs/NaS_Battery_Overview.pdf

When we think about engineers, we usually think of them as humans who use science and technology to solve practical problems. Maybe design and build an airplane or a bridge or a computer. Now these humans may be getting some competition from technology-using crows.

These crows live in the jungles of New Caledonia, in the South Pacific, and they seem to be able to use tools to solve a pretty complicated problem. For crows, that is. Some Australian researchers gave them a problem. Pay attention. It’s a little complicated.

They put a scrap of food outside the crows’ cage, far enough away that the crows couldn’t reach it. Also outside the cage was a long stick, long enough to reach the food but farther than the crows could reach. Inside the cage was a short stick, tied to the crows’ perch. It was too short to reach the food, but long enough to reach the longer stick. Got all that?

No problem for the crows. They untied the string and used the short stick to get the long stick, which they used to reach the food. Just like that.

Not much of a problem, for a human engineer, but pretty nifty for a bird.

We don’t see any problem-solving crows around here, but we’re still done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Learn more:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8631486.stm

http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/data/crow/

Not that long ago, nanotechnology was the hottest thing around. It was going to help us do miraculous things. Medical robots that would slide inside our bodies to fix what’s wrong. Ultra-tiny electronics. It’s a long list. But these days it’s hard to find nanotechnology at all.

Or is it? Engineers say nanotechnology is right where it needs to be: hard at work in research and development labs and high-tech factories. Its image problem comes from the fact that very little nano stuff is consumer products. You’ll probably never go the mall to buy a nanoparticle. But you already may be buying products made possible by nanotechnology. And some of the products nanotechnology is making possible are really cool.

Take, for example, the diagnostic system engineers at a Massachusetts company are developing. This device, about the size of a laptop, will let doctors run diagnostic screens on blood and urine samples right in their offices. Almost instantly, without sending them out to a lab. Experts suggest it could cut the costs of such tests by a third. Sexy? No. Important? You bet. Or how about the next generation of computer chips? Look to nano to make them real. Or cancer drugs that will target and attack tumors more precisely. Nanotech again.

Nano or not, this is it for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Learn more:

http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2010/03

/29/nanotechnologys_small_wonders_opening_new_frontiers/?page=full

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology

http://www.nano.gov/

http://www.scientificamerican.com/topic.cfm?id=nanotechnology

We don’t ride the train to work, but people who do say the crowds in big train stations can really heat things up. For most of us, that’s just uncomfortable. But engineers in Sweden have come up with a way to use that heat. About 250,000 people crowd through Stockholm’s main train station every day. Swedish engineers have worked out a way to use that body heat for wintertime heating.

They use the station’s ventilation system to move the heated air to big underground tanks of water. Heat the water and you’ve got a big heat source.

It’s not a new idea. The Mall of America in Minneapolis recycles the heat produced by shoppers to help keep the 220-acre building warm during Minnesota winters. The engineers in Sweden have taken the idea one better. They’re using the hot air from the station to heat a new office building a couple of hundred yards away. The commuter-heated water cuts heating bills for the office building by about 20 percent.

It’s a nifty idea, but it isn’t magic. You can’t pump the water too far before it loses its heat. But in places like Sweden where energy is expensive, it works.

All this talking has warmed us up nicely, but it’s still time to go. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Learn more:

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1981919,00.html

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379_1944307,00.html

Most people don’t see much connection between dolls and engineers. It’s not obvious. But there is one. It’s Barbie.

After a 125 incarnations as everything from nurse to TV news anchor, in Barbie’s 126^th career, she’s an engineer. A computer engineer. She’s properly geeky with a pink laptop, smart phone, pink-framed glasses, Bluetooth earpiece. She’s cool. And if you look closely, you’ll see that the binary code on her laptop screen spells, BARBIE. Barbie. Slick. The doll’s packaging and store displays are designed to emphasize the idea, too.

It’s easy to chuckle a little at Barbie as computer engineer, but Mattel is serious. The idea was chosen by a vote of Barbie fans, and the voting went viral among women engineers. Mattel did its homework on this one, too. They worked with the National Academy of Engineering and the Society of Women Engineers to hone Barbie’s image. The company wants to make money on it, of course. But it also set out to present engineering to young girls as a cool and creative career. One they should consider.

That’s a good message and one young girls need to hear. Women in the United States receive only about 11 percent of bachelor’s degrees in computer science and 15 percent in computer engineering. We need to fix that.

So, go get ‘em, computer engineer Barbie. See everybody next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://www.neatorama.com/2010/02/12/barbie-the-computer-engineer/

http://campustechnology.com/Articles/2007/11/Women-Lose-Ground-in-IT-Computer-Science.aspx?Page=2

http://www.ncwit.org/

Computers and cars have been rolling along together for quite a while now. Henry Ford wouldn’t know what to think.

The first computer control unit in a production automobile seems to be one in a 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado that controlled spark plug timing in the engine. In 1978, the Cadillac Seville had a trip computer controlled by a computer chip. By 1980, electronic control units operated exhaust emission control system in several cars.

These days, microprocessor-controlled devices, or electronic control units, keep track of and operate all sorts of things. Acceleration and braking, the features that bedevil Toyota. Brakes, cruise control, engine valve timing, anti-skip brakes, traction control, door locks.

It’s not just high-end vehicles. Even basic econoboxes usually have at least 30 of them. Some luxury cars have as many as 100. And these are not simple little chips. Many of the cars and trucks we drive have at least 100-million lines of computer code on board. That’s more than many jet fighter planes.

Using computers to help operate the vehicle makes sense. They can process information from sensors in vehicle operating systems almost instantaneously and act on it much faster than human drivers can. But when something goes wrong, sometimes it’s really wrong.

Our computer is processing nicely, and it’s taking us home now. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/technology/05electronics.html

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/under-the-hood/trends-innovations/car-computer.htm

http://www.gizmag.com/go/4176/

When we think about the future, the idea most people have involves young people doing new things. But this isn’t quite a true picture. If you look at the numbers, the future is going to belong to older people. The UN says more than 700 million people over 60 are alive on earth now. And by 2050, there will be two billion that age. Just in the United States, more than one person in 10 is over 65 now. In 20 years, that will grow to 20 percent of the population.

These numbers have big implications for the things we use in everyday life. Everything from labels that are easy to read with aging eyes to cars with controls that are easy to see and easy to reach.

Some engineers are thinking about what this means for designing new products. They’re using specially equipped cars to learn how older people’s eyes move around the dashboard and out the windshield in different driving situations. Others are looking into nifty gadgets like scanners that might combine grocery shoppers’ medical information with information scanned from food packages to suggest healthy choices.

Part of what the engineers are learning is how to get engineers in their 20s and 30s to think about products as if they were 65.

We’re getting older every minute, and we’re done for this time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

For more:

http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2009/03/23/at_mits_agelab_growing_old_is_the_new_frontier/

http://www.designnews.com/article/195758-MIT_s_AgeLab_is_Engineering_for_the_Ages.php

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/06/mits-aware-car/

Just about everybody remembers C3PO, one of Luke Skywalker’s robot sidekicks in Star Wars. Well, guess what? NASA is catching up, with a robot the space agency has dubbed R2, short for Robonaut 2. R2 doesn’t talk too well, but it looks a lot like the prissy movie robot. From the waist up, anyway. And it can use its hands to do almost anything a human astronaut can do. Far more than earlier humanoid robots.

R2 is the second generation of human-like robots NASA and General Motors have been working on for almost 10-years. So far, it’s just the top half of a human like figure, complete with a shiny helmet-head. With arms and five-fingered hands, just like humans. It’s not that strong: 20 pounds in each hand is about all it can handle, but it can move and manipulate that weight almost as well as you or I. The robot uses advanced control, sensor and vision technology. And it’s designed to use the same hand tools humans do.

NASA is working with GM to design and build the human-like robot. It’s aimed at duplicating the same dexterity astronauts have in their EVA suits. GM isn’t that interested in what R2 can do in space, but they would like to have robots that can work safely and efficiently around humans in manufacturing plants.

R2 is waving good-bye and we’re gone.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/robonaut.html

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17912_3-10447375-72.html

http://www.howstuffworks.com/robonaut.htm

It’s pop quiz time. Name two famous scientists. If you pay attention to science at all, it’s easy. Albert Einstein. Stephen Hawking. We know Einstein for the theory of relativity. Hawking for his work in cosmology. There are lots more.

Now for a tough one. Give us two famous engineers. Not so easy, is it? That’s a problem for a lot of engineers. And it sounds silly, but a lot of the top engineers are leaving the profession for jobs where they’ll be better known. And make more money. Doctor. Lawyer. Corporate manager.

A lot of engineers should be famous. They’ve had huge impacts on our lives, now and in the future. Here’s a few. Start with Neil Armstrong, first person to step onto the Moon. An aerospace engineer. Grace Hopper, who invented the COBOL computer language and the first compiler. Burt Rutan designed and built the first airplane to fly around the world without refueling or stopping. Aeronautical engineer.

Now, a really important one. Martin Cooper. Electrical engineer. He invented the cell phone. Where would you be without him? NASCAR driver Ashton Lewis is a mechanical engineer.

So. Now you know. It’s up to you to make them famous.

We’ve had all the fame we can take and we’re going home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://students.egfi-k12.org/famous-engineers/

http://www.knowledgerush.com/kr/encyclopedia/List_of_famous_engineers/

http://www.factacular.com/subjects/Famous_Engineers

A lot of the things engineers design are meant to do something faster than before. Computer chips. Airplanes. Safety switches. Sometimes the difference between fast and faster isn’t much, but we need to know how small that difference is.

Here are some of them. Pay attention. These really go by fast. Let’s start out slow, with a tenth of a second. That’s how long it takes your eye to blink. A hundredth of a second: one beat of a hummingbird’s wings. A thousandth of a second: the flash of the strobe in your camera. A millionth of a second. A microsecond: the time it takes news of the pain in your neck to get to your brain.

These things all sound kinda quick to us, but they’re really pretty poky. Next is a billionth of a second. A nanosecond. In a nanosecond, you’d just be starting that eyeblink we saw earlier. But your laptop has already added two numbers together. High-end computer processors get it done in trillionths of a second. We’re getting faster but we’re not done yet.

Now, we’re getting really quick, an attosecond. A trillionth of a second. In 24 attoseconds, an electron has flashed around the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. Time gets even smaller and faster than this, but our time is running out. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://campaign.constantcontact.com/render?v=001qwhULkbmHDvufah28uSjPlJ0p4YO5wbFmB5bws699RFabm2raR-_-hJ-xkuYQMkKW96OwbvpuGHOXSi2PuOUk0vbiu8ldNfC9TuMLNnfVgusso-01FTD2MCSaITpT9hqN2DP9nurkaD8iu8kc4WDKg%3D%3D

http://www.natalieangier.com/main.php

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time

It’s hard to imagine life without the internet. E-mail. The World Wide Web. Online shopping. In fact, Finland has declared broadband internet access a legal right. The internet has come a long way since the first message, it wasn’t even e-mail yet, in 1969. At first, it wasn’t even the internet. It was the ARPA-net, and it connected computer terminals, terminals, no PCs or laptops yet, in California and Utah.

And that first message wasn’t even a joke. It was just two letters. L and O. It was supposed to be longer: the word, login. But the system crashed after the first two letters. Some things never change.

The internet has come a long way since those first four terminals. Now more than a billion people a month access the ‘net. And they use the ‘net differently from what the earliest developers expected. The first network’s computers were about 400 miles apart. Now we get spam from all over the world. The early research that led to today’s internet was paid for by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA. The idea behind the original network was to give researchers a way to exchange research information quickly. Not an Amazon.com in sight.

We’re logging off our net. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091029-internet-40th-anniversary.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet

If you wanted to see bionic arms or legs in action, you used to have to look back to 1970s television shows or Star Wars movies. Now, those fantasies are moving off the screen and into real life.

A young woman who lost an arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident is using a computer-controlled, electric-powered arm to do almost everything her own arm could do. Peel and eat a piece of fruit. Fold clothes. Even wash the dishes. And maybe best of all, all she has to do is think about what she wants to do, and it happens.

It works like this. Doctors moved the ends of the nerves that used to connect to her mangled arm to her chest. Electrodes on a harness detect tiny electric signals from those nerves and transmit them to a miniature computer. The computer translates them into signals that control small electric motors in her new arm and hand. When she wants to pick up an apple from the kitchen table, she thinks it and her arm, hand and fingers do it.

One problem: the arm and hand have no sense of touch. But everything else seems to be working fine.

Our arm isn’t computer controlled, but it’s still time to close the mike and leave. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://www.savevid.com/video/claudia-mitchell-operates-a-bionic-arm-with-her-brain-at-ric-no-sound.html

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MedicalMysteries/story?id=5715902&page=1

http://www.ric.org/aboutus/mediacenter/press/2007/07302007.aspx

When people talk about solar energy, they usually mean one of two things. Photovoltaic panels or solar concentrating plants. Some engineers are trying something else. An updated version of a 200-year-old invention to turn sunlight into electricity. This old technology is something called a Stirling engine. A Scottish clergyman named, you guessed it, Stirling, invented it in 1816.

The idea is simple. A Stirling engine has two cylinders and pistons. Kind of like a two-cylinder motorcycle engine. The space above the pistons is filled with a fluid, usually air or helium. Heat the gas in one cylinder and it expands, moving the piston. The gas cools and moves to the other cylinder, where it moves that piston and flows back to the first cylinder, where it’s heated again and the whole cycle starts over. It’s more complicated than this, but you should get the idea. They’re a lot more efficient than conventional internal combustion engines and need only a little outside heat to keep the cycle going.

In solar power plants, sunlight provides the heat that makes the gas expand. Sunlight is focused on the Stirling engine by a concentrator that looks like a big, shiny satellite TV dish. Stirling engines spin electric generators the same way turbines or diesel engines do.

Whew! It’s getting hot in here. We’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=are-engines-the-future-of-solar-power

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=stirling-in-deep-space

Who’s up for a road trip? We’re going to take one. A heavy-duty road trip. Today, on Engineering Works!

Just about everybody’s taken a road trip at some point in their lives. Vacation. Visiting relatives in another state. Finding yourself. This trip was more ambitious than any of those.

First, when we say heavy-duty, we’re not kidding. This road trip moved a 900,000 pound electric generator from the Port of Houston to a power plant under construction near a small town in central Texas. About 250 miles away. The generator itself was about 20 feet high and almost 40 feet long. That’s pretty impressive, all by itself.

But it’s just the beginning. The generator rode on a two-part heavy hauler. Together, the two parts were about 300-feet long and rolled along on almost 300-tires. Imagine a 30-foot-wide slice of a football field, rolling down the highway. Generator and carrier together weighed almost 2,000,000 pounds. Nine hundred tons.

If you were looking for speed, this wasn’t the trip for you. Generator and hauler rolled down the highway at less than 10 miles an hour. It was pushed and pulled along by four diesel tractors, kind of like the ones that pull semi-trailers, but bigger. Planning the trip took about six months and it took about a month to get the generator to its new home.

Our road trip is over now, and we’re heading home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by K-A-M-U F-M in College Station. Learn more about Engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2mSat0tEBA

http://www.roadtransport.com/blogs/big-lorry-blog/2010/02/mammoet-usa-heavy-hauling-with.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhhCZwQLbTc

The Hoover Dam on the Colorado River is one of the biggest and most complex engineering projects ever. The water and electric power it provides made Las Vegas and other Western sun belt cities possible. But it doesn’t make a very good bridge. US 93 crosses the Black Canyon of the Colorado on top of the dam. The highway there is only two lanes wide and twists and turns a lot on either side of the dam. The highway is a major NAFTA route through Arizona, Colorado and Utah, and more than 14-thousand vehicles cross it every day. Sometimes traffic gets pretty tied up around the dam.

Engineers started building a real bridge about a quarter-mile south of the dam in 2005. It’s an impressive project. The roadway crosses the canyon 900 feet above the river on an arch and columns that seem to hang in the air. The bridge itself is almost 2,000 feet long and carries four lanes of traffic and a sidewalk so tourists can get a good view of the dam.

Building it was a bit of a trick. They started the arch from both sides of the canyon, and it met in the middle. A network of cranes and cables kept it up until the two halves met.

We’ve crossed our bridge today and we’ll be on our way. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://www.hooverdambypass.org/

http://scienceray.com/technology/engineering/the-incredible-hoover-dam-bypass-bridge-under-construction/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_O%27Callaghan_%E2%80%93_Pat_Tillman_Memorial_Bridge

If you’re a serious cyclist or know someone who is, you probably know that over the years, the stuff really good bikes are made of has changed. From steel and aluminum to exotic alloys and carbon fiber. Some engineers are taking the search for the best bicycle material the other way. All the way back to bamboo.

This sounds like green technology gone crazy. Except for one thing. It works. If you’ve ever watched a construction worker in Shanghai swing a bamboo-handled sledge hammer, you know. Bamboo is tough. And it’s light. Bamboo bike frames weigh about four-pounds. Features you need in a bike built for serious riding or racing. Bamboo frames also absorb vibration better than carbon fiber, absorb impacts better, and are less likely to break.

Like many other good things, good bamboo bike frames don’t come cheap. Some cost more than $2,500. Which, compared to top carbon fiber frames, isn’t bad.

Not all bamboo bikes are expensive or aimed at riding the Tour de France. One engineer has come up with a bamboo bike that people can build at home with basic tools. It’s intended for folks in Africa and other developing areas who need cheap, durable transportation.

Our bike isn’t made of bamboo, but we’re still going to ride it home. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,670689,00.html

http://www.calfeedesign.com/

csaila/flickr.com

It seems sometimes like there’s an app for everything. Some of them are even useful. Save energy with your smart phone. Today, on Engineering Works!

Smart phones are learning to do amazing things. What’s the weather going to be like this afternoon? Bring up your weather app and find out. Out to dinner with friends? One app will split the check for you. Another turns your iPhone into an iTunes remote.

App developers are aiming at another target, too. Using your phone to manage your house. Especially the amount of energy you use. Saving energy is getting sexy. One German company has developed an app that lets you open and close windows, turns lights on or off, change thermostat settings, from anywhere, through your phone. Other companies offer similar apps and more are getting into the game every day, it seems.

A technological perfect storm is driving these developments. We’re all concerned about energy use and climate change. More companies are developing technology to control home energy use, almost hour by hour. And smart phones and software for apps give you the technology to do something about.

It’s not all mobile technology. Major household appliance manufacturers expect to launch internet-compatible washing machines and refrigerators any day now. Match ‘em up with an app and you’re good to go. Other companies are getting ready with adapter plugs that will let older appliances talk to your app.

Our get-out-of-here app is ready and we’re gone. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more, visit:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,670235,00.html

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-50422.html

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/10/20/smart-phone-will-clean-energy-be-apples-killer-app/tab/article/

Engineers in Germany are combining old and new solar technology into what may be the biggest solar energy project ever.

They plan to erect solar collectors in the Sahara Desert, where there’s lots of sunshine. And lots of room. More than three and a half million square miles. That’s as big as the continental United States. A solar array big enough to supply the whole world with electric power could fit into 35-thousand square miles. One percent of the Sahara. About the size of the state of Maine.

Maybe the coolest thing about the planned project is that most of the technology has been around for years and we know it works. They’ll collect the sun’s heat with something called parabolic troughs. A parabolic trough is like a big pipe split in half lengthwise that focuses sunlight on glass tubes that run above the trough’s center.

The tubes carry special oil that’s heated to more than 700° Fahrenheit. The hot oil turns water into steam to spin turbines that’ll drive electric generators. Simple. The project’s first goal is to meet 15 percent of Europe’s electricity needs by 2050. The only real catch is getting the electricity from the Sahara to Europe, but they think they’ve got that one solved, too.

We’ve got solar energy solved for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more, visit:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,664842,00.html

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/desertec-sahara-solar-power-project-produce-first-electricity-2015.php

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3347892/Sahara-sun-could-power-all-of-Europe.html

The problem started about 150 ago. That’s when the first transatlantic cable connected the east and west shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, people could send telegrams across the ocean in minutes instead of letters by ship that took weeks. It doesn’t sound like much today, when you can call anywhere from anywhere on your cell phone, but back then it was a big deal.

It didn’t last. The cable failed a few weeks after the first message was sent. A group of engineers met to figure out what went wrong. Then they discovered they had another problem. Electricity carried the messages from one side of the ocean to the other. But nobody had words yet to describe electricity yet, especially the important ideas of current and resistance.

In the end, they borrowed the names of scientists who’d done important research into electricity to describe what they needed. You’ll probably recognize the words, even if you don’t recognize the people. Ampere, from Andre-Marie Ampere, to describe electric current. Ohm, from Georg Ohm, for resistance in a wire. Watt, from James Watt, available power. And volt, from Alessandro Volta, the amount of electrical – pressure – in a system.

We do have the words we need to get out of here, so we’re gone. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/cable/

http://www.history-magazine.com/cable.html

When you saw the Terminator movies or Star Trek, you know that mixing up computers and humans is standard stuff in science fiction. But now, engineers are doing the next best thing. Computers and insects. Beetles.

They’re putting electrodes into the nervous systems of immature beetles. When the beetles grow up, they add a tiny battery and a computer microcontroller. The whole assembly can be connected to a laptop computer through a wireless link. And they’re ready to go.

Flying a beetle is pretty straightforward. A joystick attached to the computer can send an electric current into any of the electrodes. If the operator, pilot?, wants the beetle to fly to the right, an electric pulse to the left-side electrode gets the muscles on that side working a little harder and the beetle makes a right turn. You get the idea.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is paying for the research. It’s not clear exactly what the Pentagon wants radio-controlled beetles for, but we can make some guesses. They’re also looking into flies, moths and dragonflies. Other researchers say the cyborg beetles are a good way to learn more about the dynamics of flight.

The beetle we’re watching is getting ready to head out the door, so we better be close behind. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Hybrid automobiles have been around for quite a while. Honda introduced the first gasoline-electric hybrid to the United States in 1999. In 2004, Toyota started selling the Prius and Ford’s Escape hybrid S-U-V came on the market. Now, it seems like everybody’s got a hybrid. Even Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz.

Everybody sees why driving a hybrid makes sense, mostly great gas mileage. Some, more than 50 miles per gallon. And then there’s the hybrid bulldozer. Yep, bulldozer. You know, the big yellow machines that push dirt around construction sites. Caterpillar has brought out a hybrid bulldozer, a diesel-electric version of its D7 dozer.

It’s the first one, and it seems to do the same for dozers that the Prius and its automotive brethren do for automobiles. The D7E, for electric, dozer offers better fuel economy than its non-hybrid counterpart. Between 25 and 30 percent better. And it’s quieter. None of this comes for free, of course. Like automobiles, the hybrid dozer is more expensive than standard diesel dozers. About 20-percent more expensive than a comparable D7 diesel. The contractor that bought the first one says he’s happy with the way the hybrid dozer performs, and he expects it to pay for itself in less than three years.

Our dozer is at the door and we’re out of here. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://enr.construction.com/products/equipment/2009/1222-CaterpillarHybridDozer.asp
http://greensource.construction.com/news/2009/090805Hybrid-Bulldozer.asp

If you’ve ever taken a physics course, you know that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. A hundred-86-thousand miles a second. Seven-hundred – million – miles an hour. Everything physicists know says you can’t go faster. But some physicists and engineers think they can do an end run around the speed-of-light limit.

They say that ideas developed about 50 years ago by a German scientist named Burkhard Heim suggest that we could use a very strong magnetic field to push spacecraft into another dimension. A dimension where the physical laws that make the speed of light as fast as anything can go, don’t exist.

The idea sounds like science fiction. And a lot of top physicists say that’s all it is. But if it’s real, it could mean traveling to Mars in three hours or to a nearby star in three months. The interesting part is that the Department of Energy has a device – the Z-machine – that could produce the kind of ultra-powerful magnetic field we’d need to see if the idea might work. If it does, researchers could be testing a working engine in five years.

Even if everything turns out the way the visionaries think it will, it’ll be a long time before you can buy a ticket for a day trip to Mars.

So, beam us up, Scotty. We’re through here for now.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too.

Visit us at http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

When the Apollo astronauts were on the moon, they only stayed a few days at a time, and batteries or fuel cells did them just fine. But now NASA is talking about astronauts staying for weeks or months. Batteries just won’t do it. They’re going to need a long-term source of power for their exploration and scientific activities.

Space experts are proposing all sorts of power sources, from solar panels to king-sized fuel cells. One of most popular ideas is a small nuclear reactor.

NASA engineers are working on an ultra-compact nuclear power plant that should generate enough electricity to run an average American house. Or a lunar exploration base. And do it for eight years. Or longer. The reactor itself is about the size of a big wastebasket. The whole thing would fit into an 18-wheel trailer with room to spare and would weigh about the same as an armored humvee.

Not everybody is convinced sending a nuclear reactor to the moon is a good idea. Protestors objected to launching NASA’s 19-97 Cassini probe, which carried 72-pounds of plutonium fuel. But the NASA engineers are convinced the lunar reactor is safe.

Our reactor is still powered up, but it’s time to go. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.  http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

It’s not Paris, but people in the French city of Toulouse still like to have their streets lit at night. There’s a problem, though. The city’s electric bills are high and climbing. So they’re trying a new way pedestrians who walk the city’s streets after dark can help. It’s easy. Just keep walking.

What they’re doing is to install sensors in the lampposts that hold up the streetlights. When the sensors detect the body heat of an approaching pedestrian, the light clicks from dim to bright. When the pedestrian moves on – between 500 and 600 yards away – the streetlight dims its light again.

They’re testing the sensor-operated streetlights now, and if it works on a short stretch of mostly residential street, they’re going to start by installing the sensors along a stretch of busy street between the city’s sports stadium and the university campus. If it works there, they plan to take it citywide. They expect to cut electricity consumption by streetlights on busy streets in half.

City administrators across France are watching what happens, and others around the world are watching, too. A group of city council members from Osaka, Japan, visited a while ago to see firsthand how it’s done.

Our streetlights are still shining, so we’ll leave before somebody dims them. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

It’s one of the goofy things about modern war. Personal armor, air evacuation and better field medicine mean that many wounded who would have died in previous conflicts, live. But they live with the effects of severe burns, brain injuries, blindness, spinal damage, amputations. Since 2001, almost 700 have lost at least one limb.

This is where technology lends a hand. Meet CAREN, the computer-assisted rehabilitation environment. CAREN is a dome that helps soldiers with artificial legs or arms learn to use them in different situations. Walking down a busy street? See other pedestrians around you. See the buildings. Hear and see traffic. A walk in the woods? See the trees, hear the wind and the birds, feel the trail twist and turn under your feet.

Computers linked to sensors on the body move a treadmill to match the ground you’d be walking over and adjust video images all around to what you’d see as you walk. There’s more to CAREN than helping injured troopers learn how to deal with their wounds. Medical researchers also use the simulator to study problems like balance disorders and how stress affects people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

There’s no clever way to end this one. Hang in there, guys. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

People in the United States have always been a little skittish about nuclear energy. Accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in Ukraine didn’t help. Construction on the most recent nuclear power plant was started in 1977, and it didn’t go online until 1996.

Then came climate change, and environmental policy-makers took another look at nuclear energy. Unlike coal-fired power plants, nuclear plants produce no carbon dioxide and – get this – even less radiation than coal-fired power plants.

Engineers are working on designs for new reactors that they say should be simpler and safer than existing reactors, and should even deal with nuclear waste. The spent fuel should be a two-fer, the engineers say. Recycle it into new fuel that could go back into the reactor. This reduces the amount of waste we have to store. The technology to do this already exists, and what we now call spent fuel still has about 95 percent of its energy.

New reactors should be safer, with fewer ways operators could accidentally cause something to go wrong. And more automatic safeguards against accidents, like cooling systems that rely less on pumps and more on gravity to keep coolant where it needs to be for safe operation.

Our power plant is humming along, and we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Time never stops. We’ve been keeping track of it for a long time, and we’ve done it a lot of different ways – sundials, dripping water, candles with marks on them, springs and gears and pendulums, quartz crystals and electricity.

All of these timekeepers have one thing in common. They keep track of the interval between one tick and the next. And they all have a problem — the same problem. The intervals they measure aren’t always the same. They’re probably not that different, but they vary – a little or a lot. If you need to measure time exactly – to navigate a space probe or use a global positioning system – they’re not good enough.

This is where special clocks called atomic clocks come in. Instead of pendulums and gears or even quartz crystals, atomic clocks use the vibration between the nucleus and electrons of atoms – usually cesium atoms – to set the interval we use to measure time passing. Even this interval varies a little. But not much. The atomic clock at the Naval Observatory near Washington, D.C., is accurate to within about one second in 20 million years.

If you think this is accurate, clocks based on hydrogen atoms do even better over the short term. But over longer periods of time, cesium is better.

Time’s up. We’ve got to go now.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. EngineeringWorks! is on the World Wide Web, too. Visit our web site. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

It’s easy to think of big ways to keep down how much electricity we use. Compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of regular ones. Energy Star washers, driers and refrigerators. Programmable thermostats to use your heating and air conditioning efficiently. It all helps and more of us are using them.

But we’ll bet you’re wasting a lot of electricity, too. Little things. Laptops. Cell phone chargers. iPods. Game consoles. Power engineers estimate that these little power hogs make up 15-percent of household electric demand. And that’s expected to double in the next 20-years. Worldwide, it’ll take the equivalent of five-hundred-60 coal-fired power plants or two-hundred-30 nuclear plants, just to keep up with it.

Try this some time. Wait ’til it’s dark and turn out all the lights. Then start counting how many little green lights you find. You know, the little green LED that shows your computer or TV is on standby. The average American household has about 25. Each one of them is slurping up electricity.

You can cut some of this energy hogging by unplugging them when you’re not using them, or using smart power strips. Some of them just use a lot of electricity, like the cool new plasma and LCD TV sets. Some use more power than your refrigerator.

We’re unplugging our little green light and we’re gone. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

If you’ve been to a big concert, or a ball game, with a big crowd of other people, you know what happens when it’s time to leave. No matter how big the exit is, everybody gets jammed up and it goes really slowly.

Engineers in Japan have been looking at what’s going on and how to fix it. What they found makes no sense to us, but it seems to work. At least in experiments.

They started with what we’ve all seen. Even when exits are wide open, people seem to jam up in front of it. Then they tried something goofy. They put something in the way of the people trying to get out. Not so big that it blocked the way, but big enough that people had to detour around it. And it had to be in just the right place. Guess what? Everybody got out faster.

Here’s why. Usually, so many people get to the exit at the same time that it turns into a people traffic jam. Everything slows down. When there’s an obstacle, it slows some people down just enough that the congestion in the exit never happens. Even though they’re getting there slower, more people get through the exit faster than before.

Our way to the exit is clear now, and we’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Image: Travelin’ Librarian

Transistors, the things that make your iPod and computer possible. We’ll look back in history. Today, on Engineering Works!

If you look around at all the things we have that use transistors, it seems like we always must have had them. We haven’t, of course. An engineer working at Bell Laboratories invented the transistor in 1947. It was a big deal, even if nobody realized it at the time. Some folks say it was the most important invention of the 20th century.

Before transistors, we used glass vacuum tubes to process electrical signals for things like radios and the earliest computers. They did the job, but they were bulky, heavy, hot, and they broke. Easily. It took the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the race to put a man on the moon to show us how important transistors are and what they can do.

Now, transistors are the basic ingredient for computer chips. Think about it. In 19-61, a single computer chip cost more than $30. By 1971, that price had dropped to $1.25. Today, that same chip is less than a nickel.

There was a time, in the 1960s, when a radio with six or seven or 10 transistors was a big deal. Now just one high-end microprocessor chip has a billion or so. Fire up your computer and printer and print two or three periods. Each one of them could cover two million transistors.

We’ve covered transistors for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

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Engineers in Germany are getting ready to turn the electric power industry inside out. We’ll see how, today on Engineering Works!

Everybody knows how we get electricity. Big generating plants powered by coal or nuclear energy or water. It sizzles along power lines to where we use it to light our houses and power our washing machines and computers and stuff.

Maybe there’s another way. How about a really small power plant in your basement? And your neighbors and the folks down the street. Engineers at automaker Volkswagen are getting ready to build small natural gas-powered generators intended to go into people’s basements or garages.

This isn’t what you probably think. The electricity coming from your basement won’t light up your house. Not directly. It’ll go back onto the power grid as a backup for green generating systems like wind or solar power. The idea is to reduce demand on backup generators and let the power company get by with smaller and less-expensive generators.

Everybody should come out ahead. The power company because these little generators are almost twice as efficient as conventional power plants. Homeowners because heat that’s wasted in conventional generating plants heats their houses in place of conventional central heat.

Not everyone thinks it’s going to work. We’ll see. In the meantime, watch your electric meter.

We’re shutting down our power for now. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

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The hammering that Hurricane Katrina gave New Orleans isn’t news anymore. Engineers are building something they say will keep it that way. It’s a pump. A big pump. Today, on Engineering Works!

People who live in New Orleans found out the hard way that the city can be a bad place to be when a big hurricane comes. Most of the Big Easy is below sea level and it filled up with floodwaters from the storm surge when the levees broke.

Engineers are installing a big new pump they say should keep the city dry in case another big hurricane blows in. In engineer-talk, they call it the West Closure Complex, or WCC, and they say it’s the biggest pump station ever built. If everything stays on schedule, it should be completed in 2011.

The West Closure Complex will protect the city from storm surge in the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway with two layers of defense. Protection starts with steel floodgates sturdy and tall enough to block a 16-foot storm surge. Then they’ll fire up the pumps. These are big pumps, big enough to empty an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than five seconds.

They’re built solid, so they won’t collapse under pressure, the way the city’s levees did last time. The WCC is built to stand up to 140 mile-per-hour wind. Even runaway barges can’t dent it.

The wind sounds like it’s rising, and we’ll see you later.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: EPA/Maurizo Gambarini

Sometimes engineering doesn’t work out the way we planned. We’ll take a look, today on Engineering Works!

Top brass in the German army are raving about some new equipment that they say will give their soldiers a big advantage on the battlefield. The soldiers who use the new gear aren’t so enthusiastic. They say it’s too bulky, too heavy and unreliable.

The new equipment package, the – infantryman of the future – looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Think Robo Cop.

The new combat gear starts with a protective vest. Plus a built-in mini-computer, new radios and protective goggles. The whole package costs almost 30-thousand-dollars. Each.

And guess what? A lot of the German soldiers who have used it for real in Afghanistan hate it. The body armor is so bulky that soldiers wearing it have to scrunch down whenever they get into a vehicle. Really uncomfortable. The goggles tend to fog up at anything more than a brisk walk.

Then there’s the computer, which includes a satellite navigation system and electronic maps. It doesn’t have enough memory, and sometimes just plain gives wrong answers. The new radios don’t have enough range, and their earpieces tend to fall out of soldiers’ ears.

One fed-up field commander has suggested that the army start over and replace parts of it with off-the-shelf equipment that would work better and be cheaper, to boot.

We hope our engineering words are working better than that. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Image: National Human Genome Research Institute

Just when you were getting used to the idea of genetic engineering, there’s something new. We’ll take a look. Today, on Engineering Works.

If you’re at all interested in new technology, you probably know that inserting a gene or two into a plant and getting something useful back is no big deal any more. That’s genetic engineering as we now know it.

But listen to this. A new breed of genetic engineers are inventing a new field. They call it, synthetic biology. They aim to use the technology pioneered in genetic engineering to build whole new organisms. One new organism these guys are working on is a plant we could harvest and process into petroleum. Not ethanol, like people are talking about to replace gasoline, but good old oil. Growing in a field instead of miles underground.
ne ambitious group of researchers is aiming eventually at reprogramming trees to grow into the shape of a house instead of leaves and branches. It sounds like science fiction, but they’re serious. We think.
All this will be pretty neat, if it works. But there’s still a long way to go. So far, the longest DNA sequence duplicated in the laboratory is about 35-thousand units long. Compare that to human cells that duplicate a sequence three-billion, with a B, units long.

Where will it all end? Hard to tell from here. But we’re out of time, and we’re ending here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Image: Wikipedia

Most of the time when we think about engineers, we think about the nifty things they’re designing and building, now. But a lot of what they do now started a long time ago. We’ll take a look back, today on Engineering Works!

The engineers we know design and build new fuel-efficient cars, ultra-fast computers, tall buildings. Cool stuff. But many of the principles they use are thousands of years old. Consider the lever. You know what a lever is. It’s a bar of something that pivots over something else. It’s a powerful idea. Every geometry student knows what the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes said about levers: give me a fulcrum and a place to stand and I’ll move the world.

If we think about levers at all, we probably picture playground teeter-totters or prybars. But these are only the beginning. Hammers, the oars in a rowboat, wedges used to split wood. They all use the principles of the lever. Then there’s the wheel and the pulley. And the screw. They’re levers, too.

Archimedes gets a lot of credit for understanding the lever. But he wasn’t the first to think about how levers work. The earliest recorded discussion of levers appeared at least a generation before Archimedes and his famous statement. So the next time you see something really neat that an engineer did, take a minute to wonder a little. It all started a long time ago.

Long time or short, we’re done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr.com

We’re going to listen to some big words. Engineers know what they are. Today, on Engineering Works!

Engineers use numbers all the time. Sometimes these numbers are really big. Consider power engineers. Power engineers design and build the systems that make and deliver the electricity that lights our homes. They routinely talk in terms that include millions and sometimes billions. Over time, scientists and engineers have invented some nifty words to describe big numbers.

Here’s an example. Your utility company charges you for the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity you use. A kilowatt-hour is a thousand watts of electricity used for one hour. A kilowatt will light a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours.

In the world of big number words, kilo, or a thousand, is pretty puny. A kilogram only weighs a little more than two pounds. Utility company generators regularly produce power measured in millions of watts – megawatts. Many nuclear-powered generators have outputs of more than 200 megawatts. Even this is pretty small when you talk about electric power consumption around the world. That stands at just under two terawatts, two trillion watts. Makes your electric bill seem pretty trivial.

Even this isn’t the end of it. An experimental laser getting ready to go into operation will produce pulses that measure more than one petawatt. Now we’ve got a really big number. A million trillion. And there are words to talk about numbers even bigger than this. But not today.

Our number is up, and we’re quitting. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: geoftheref/Flickr.com

If you look around, there’s plastic everywhere. We’ll look, too. Today, on Engineering Works.

You see a lot of plastic because it works. It’s lighter and cheaper than metal and it’s more durable than cardboard. A lot of it can even be recycled.

In fact, engineers have designed some plastics especially to be recycled or to break down safely, quickly, completely. Biodegradable. This is the easy part. Now it gets complicated. Different biodegradable plastics need different treatments to break down as they’re supposed to.

For instance, hydrobiodegradable plastics. They’re made from food or plant starch, sometimes with oil-based polymers. Micro-organisms break them down into water, carbon dioxide, methane and biomass. This is good, but it needs an industrial composter to work. Most folks don’t have one.

Oxobiodegradable plastics are made from petroleum byproducts, like traditional plastics. Most of them have a built-in self-destruct, and they start to break down after a preset period of time. Much more quickly than traditional plastics. Sunlight, heat and what engineers call mechanical stress – basically, stomping on it or cutting it up – do the trick.

Here’s the point: getting plastics to decompose isn’t as simple as it sounds. For instance, some plastics that break down easily in the open air last forever in sealed landfills. If you recycle plastic – and we hope you do – check out what each kind of plastic you have needs to break down.

Our time today is about broken down. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Bruno Girin/Flickr.com

Everybody knows the Egyptians used huge stone blocks to build their pyramids. Some engineers aren’t so sure. We’ll listen to the argument. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody learned in school that ancient Egyptian engineers used thousands of huge limestone blocks to build the pyramids. What we didn’t learn was how the Egyptians got those blocks from the ground to the top of those pyramids.

Archaeologists and engineers have speculated for decades about how they did it. Sloping ramps. Rollers. Gangs of sweating slaves. You’ve seen the movies. But nobody knows for sure.
Now, materials engineers have come up with a new explanation that has the archaeologists in an uproar. Maybe some of those huge limestone blocks weren’t really limestone. And maybe those gangs of slaves didn’t push them up the ramps after all.

The engineers think just maybe the Egyptians invented an early kind of concrete from crushed limestone and binders that work just like the Portland cement in modern concrete. Since the powdered limestone would be just like the limestone in limestone blocks, it would be really hard to tell the difference.

So maybe instead of thousands of slaves pushing huge blocks of stone around, they were carrying bags of wet concrete and pouring it into forms on top of the half-built pyramids. Not as mysterious and romantic as big blocks of stone, but it could have worked.

We haven’t been pushing stone or carrying concrete, but we’re still done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Francois Lariviere/iStock

Photo: Darrel Ronald/Flickr.com

Here’s a question you probably never thought to ask: what should your car sound like? We’ll listen for an answer, today on Engineering Works!

We’ve all listened to cars, all our lives and we’ve always heard them. The clatter of an old VW bug. The rumble of a high-performance muscle car. But those sounds may be fading into the past. As hybrids and all-electric cars become more common, the sound of cars is changing. Hybrids and electric cars make almost no noise at all, especially when they’re moving slowly.

Some engineers think this could be a bad thing. Think about it. You’re walking across a parking lot, minding your own business, and suddenly there’s that almost-silent electric car. Right on top of you. You never heard it coming. And imagine what it would be like at night. Or any time if you can’t see.

Engineers are working on ways to fix the problem. By adding sound back into electric cars. Some are going the simple route. Just plain noise. One possible added sound is a little like a jet engine with some added static. Kind of hard to miss.

Another possibility some engineers are exploring would allow you to change the sound of your electric car or hybrid to fit your mood. Anything from that jet to a superstock Dodge or an 18-wheeler.

Our car isn’t electric or silent. It’s just plain noisy. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo:EPA/islamizationwatch

Here’s a strange thought to start your day: You probably have something in common with a terrorist. We’ll think about that, today on Engineering Works!

We usually don’t think of terrorists as firing up the grill for a backyard barbecue. That’s something folks like us do. But the chances are pretty good that when you hit the switch to light your gas-fired grill, you’re using technology terrorists use for what they do.

Sounds scary, huh? It’s not, really. Here’s what’s going on. When you push that button to ignite the gas to grill your steak, the pressure from your finger bends a small crystal down in the switch. Just a little. Engineers call it a piezoelectric crystal. That bending causes stresses in the crystal and out comes an electric current. Enough to make a spark to touch off the gas.

One of terrorists’ favorite weapons is a rocket launcher called an R-P-G. If you were an explosives expert, you could take apart the warhead of an R-P-G rocket. Don’t try this at home, kids. Inside, there’s a thing called a detonator that makes the explosive explode when the rocket hits something.

Inside the detonator is a piezoelectric crystal, a lot like the one in your gas grill. When the rocket hits something, the force bends that crystal, and the electricity it makes touches off the warhead.

Our crystal has taken about all the pressure we can stand, so we’re out of here. We’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Beacon Power Corp.

One of the newest ideas for storing a lot of electricity is also an old idea. We’re going around in circles. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody knows about electricity, even if all you know is that we use a lot of it.

Here’s the problem. We use a lot more electricity at two in the afternoon than we do at two in the morning. This means we need enough generators to give us the electricity we use during the day. At night, when businesses are closed and most of us are asleep, we use a lot less electricity and we need a lot fewer generators. But they’re still there and they’re not doing anything. That’s expensive and wasteful.

Power engineers think we can use some old technology to solve the problem. It’s called a flywheel, and the idea has been around a long time. Think potter’s wheel. The engine in your car has a flywheel, too. It stores some of the energy the engine produces to help it run smoothly, especially at slow speeds.

The new flywheels are really high-tech. And really heavy, more than a ton each. They spin on magnetic bearings. At twice the speed of sound. The idea is to spin them up when power demand is low and use the energy they store to turn generators when demand is high. That should help even out the load on generating systems.

Our flywheel is running down, and it’s time to leave. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Euchiasmus/Wikipedia

Sometimes, they say, life imitates art. So does engineering — sort of. We’ll see how, today On Engineering Works!

If you’re a fan of campy science fiction movies, you might remember the 1966 flick, Fantastic Voyage. In the movie, a submarine with a crew of medical experts is shrunk and injected into the bloodstream of a guy in a coma. Except for Raquel Welch, the movie is pretty forgettable. Of course, shrinking the submarine is pretty neat, too.

Now, biomedical engineers have pulled off something like the shrinking submarine, except it’s real. This time, it’s a miniature camera in a capsule. No Raquel Welch. Sorry, guys. Doctors use this camera capsule to examine the inside of the small intestine, one part of the body that’s hard to reach with more conventional diagnostic tools. The capsule is bigger than the fictional submarine — about the size of a big vitamin capsule. It carries a camera on a computer chip, light source, radio transmitter and a battery.

Here’s how it works. You swallow the capsule and it passes through your stomach to your small intestine, taking pictures as it goes. The images are transmitted to a receiver on a belt, powered by its own battery pack. In a day or so, the capsule passes on through the rest of your digestive system and your doctor collects the images from the receiver and analyzes them. Pretty cool.

Our capsule has gone where all capsules go, and we’re done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Chaim Zvi/Flickr.com

Turn on the tap and the water comes out. No big deal. We’ll drink to that. Today, on Engineering Works!

Most of the time, most places, in the United States, getting enough water is no big deal. Kitchen sink, bathroom shower – turn them on and the water comes out. Making that happen is more complicated – and less certain – than you think.

Consider this. It takes a million miles of pipe to get the water to everyone who takes that drink. Plus 24,000 storage tanks and more than 14 million valves. Almost seven million fire hydrants. And water experts estimate that there are about 25 breaks in every hundred miles of water main. At an average cost of $3,000 each, fixing those breaks is an expensive job.

Getting the water to you is only the beginning. It has to be clean and good to drink. Water spends a lot of time in storage before it gets to you. And the longer between when it’s purified and you drink it, the more opportunity it has to pick up germs and other nasty stuff.

Water quality engineers are working hard to come up with the best ways to get that water to you and be sure it’s clean when it gets there. But it’s a truly complicated problem. Solving it involves everything from construction and understanding how water behaves as it moves to chemistry and microbiology.

Somebody just closed our tap and we’re through. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Huw Pritchard/Flickr.com

Hold onto your hat! This one’s going to go by fast. High speed, today on Engineering Works!

High fuel prices are driving most automotive engineers these days to find ways to give you better gas mileage. But not all of them. Some are looking for speed.

The ultimate in all-out speed are top fuel dragsters. These vehicles are – fast. Like 300 miles an hour fast. Like getting from one end of a quarter-mile strip to the other in about four and a half seconds. About as long as it took to read that sentence.

Here’s how they do it. Horsepower. Lots of it. A 500-cubic-inch Hemi engine turns out so much horsepower that we don’t have the instruments to measure it. Engineers calculate it at about 5,000 horsepower. That’s more than the first four rows at Indianapolis on Memorial Day.

These engines are hot. The fuel burns at more than 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By the end of the run, the spark plugs have pretty much melted and the engine keeps running by itself. The only way to stop it is to shut off the fuel.

And talk about gas mileage. Going flat out, a top fuel dragster burns a gallon and a half of nitro methane fuel – every second. That’s as much as a 747 airliner uses. But the dragster produces more energy.

The timer here is running down and our light is green. We’re out of here.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Wendy Longo/Flickr.com

This one’s going to be rough. Or maybe it’ll be smooth. Engineering what you feel, today on Engineering Works!

Think about something nice to touch. The smooth wood of fine furniture. A freshly laundered towel. A baby’s cheek. We all know what they feel like, but try to tell somebody what that feeling is. Hard to do, isn’t it?

Maybe this explains why a new field engineers are exploring is so difficult. It’s called – haptics – from the Greek word for touch. More and more products feature haptic technology. In a simple way, the tiny motors that make your cell phone vibrate in your pocket are haptic technology.

Cell phone makers are hinting that new phones may have haptics built into their touch screens. Maybe the feel of a switch clicking on or off. Or pushing a button. Some visionaries are dreaming about adding the right vibrations to music, to make listening to your iPod more like being at a live concert.

One of the most interesting applications of haptic technology is also one of the most useful. It’s a simulator that helps nurses and medical technicians learn how to start an I-V or draw blood from a vein. It looks and feels like a human arm, and you can actually feel when you’ve gotten the needle into the vein. Or missed it. We don’t know if it says ouch!

Even if it’s not haptic, our timer is buzzing and our time is up. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo by: LostBob Photos/Flickr.com

We’re going to listen to the music. Today, on Engineering Works!

Guitars, especially electric guitars are an important part of modern popular music. Imagine the Beatles without George Harrison’s guitar. Or Jimi Hendrix without distortion. Electric guitars made it work.

Guitar players started experimenting with electricity to amplify their instruments during the 1930s, when big band swing was big. The guitar was getting lost in all that brass.

The first pickups for guitars were pretty simple – a magnet the size and shape of a tube of lipstick wrapped lengthwise with wire. Simple, huh? But basically, that’s it.

Here’s how it works. The magnet is surrounded by a magnetic field. Think elementary school science class: Iron filings; a magnet; and a sheet of glass.

Put that wire-wrapped magnet under the steel strings of a guitar and you’re ready to go. As the strings vibrate, they disturb the magnetic field and create a small electric current in the wires wrapped around the magnet. Feed that tiny signal into an amplifier and you’ve got the sound that made electric guitars with names like Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker famous.

The sound those early pickups produced wasn’t that great. They tended to pick up noise from room wiring, too, but they worked. And engineers and musicians have made them lots better over the years, since. The pickups on today’s guitars provide cleaner, stronger sound, but they’re still basically magnets and wire.

It’s time to wrap up this gig. See you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo by: FogCityFog/fklickr.com

Break out your flowery shirt and digital camera. Today, we’re tourists, on Engineering Works!

Seeing new places is one of the big reasons tourists are tourists. They want to see and find out about things they’ve never seen before. Let’s go to Rome and see the coliseum. Or ride the cable cars in San Francisco.

There’s one problem, though. If you’ve never been in San Francisco, you might have trouble figuring out where all the neat stuff is. Engineers have come up with the perfect tour guide. This one knows the important things to see, knows all about them, and won’t get lost trying to find them.
This tour guide combines a special two-seater rental car, a GPS system and a computer. Pick the attraction you want to see, turn the system on and you’re off. The G-P-S keeps track of where you are and tells you where to turn to get to where you want to go. Along the way, the GPS keeps track of where you are and the computer describes what you see around you.

When you get where you’re going, say, San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, it tells you what’s there to see. Pretty neat!

The only problem is that so far the GPS tour system only operates in three cities. But at least you don’t have to remember to tip the guide at the end of the day.

Our tour is over for today, but we’ll see you on down the highway.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: rawkus/stock.xchng.com

What would the Fourth of July be without fireworks? Today, we’ll ooh! and ahh! over those spectacular aerial displays, on Engineering Works.

From pom-pon bursts to sparkling flares, there’s nothing like fireworks to captivate a crowd. For centuries, we’ve celebrated royal weddings, baptisms and other special events with lavish productions that light up the night sky. Today fireworks shows set to music have become big entertainment spectacles for sports events, theme parks and holidays.

Your basic firework is a shell, filled with explosive powder and stars – pellets made of metallic salts and other chemicals. The pellets make the shape, and the chemicals in the pellets make the colors. When the powder ignites and bursts – anywhere from 400 to 1,000 feet up – the explosion pushes out the stars. Then the stars themselves explode into the shapes that draw oohs and ahhs – a glittering ring, a weeping willow, a starburst. The pattern you get depends on how you arrange the stars in the shell.

Thanks to advances by experts in pyrotechnics – “fire art” – fireworks get fancier every year. Instead of lighting them by hand, technicians switch on an electric current. They use computers to control the timing of music and fireworks to create displays that seem impossible. With such excitement, it’s enough to keep all eyes on the fireworks show at the Super Bowl unless there’s another … wardrobe malfunction.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: iko/flickr.com

The engineers are at it again. Recharge your iPod from your swimsuit. We’ll look into it. Today. On Engineering Works!

One of the biggest problems with portable high-tech equipment like cell phones and iPods is that the batteries keep running down. It’s hard to recharge a fading iPod at the beach.

Some engineers in Germany may have an answer for you. A solar-powered swimsuit, complete with a miniature plug-in for your MP3 player’s power cord. And you can even swim in it.

Engineers at an energy company in Hamburg are working with a German fashion house to design and build a swimsuit with banks of photovoltaic cells to convert all that seaside or poolside sunlight into electricity. You have to let the cells dry off before you plug in after your swim, but it’s the idea that counts.

In case you’ve forgotten, or didn’t know, photovoltaic cells are those little solar cells on the front of your calculator. Bigger versions produce electricity that powers traffic signals and streetlights in some places and satellites in orbit.

Photovoltaic cells use sunlight to produce electricity directly from sunlight. The process works because flat layers of semiconductors in the cells absorb energy from sunlight. This energy knocks loose electrons in the semiconductors and they move around. When they move, we get electricity. Someday maybe enough to run our houses or cars.

Our swimsuit seems to be running down and we better turn off the mike. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Mike Small/flickr.com

Let’s talk about water, floods, and one way engineers deal with them. Today, on Engineering Works!

Humans have been trying to figure out what to do about floods for a long time. Most of us are thinking more about floods now than we used to, ever since Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005.

One of the oldest ways of dealing with floods is to build levees to keep the water out. Levees are earthen walls along rivers that usually keep flood water in the river and out of your house. That’s what was supposed to be protecting New Orleans.

Ancient engineers built the first levees about 3,000 years ago along the Nile River. Today, you can find levees all over the world — Germany’s Rhine River, the Po River in Italy, and the Danube. The Mississippi River has about 3,500 miles of levees, all by itself.

Levees are more complicated than they look. They’re more than just piles of dirt along the riverbank. Levees need to be able to resist floodwaters, and they’ve got to be protected against erosion by the river.

The first levees around New Orleans were built in 1718. By the time Katrina got there, there were 350 miles of levees along the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain.

Now, engineers are busy figuring out what went wrong with the New Orleans levees and working on ways to keep them from failing again.

The rain has stopped, so we’re going to get out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Neerav Bhatt/Flickr.com

Engineers are finding design inspiration in new places. We’ll find some, too. Today on Engineering Works!

When most of us think of engineering design, we picture computers and high-tech laboratories. A lot of engineers do, too. But some are finding inspiration in odd places. Like the Australian outback. A spiky inch-tall lizard called the thorny devil that lives in the dry, 100-degree-plus desert is giving engineers ideas for efficient ways to move traces of water from one place to another.

This lizard doesn’t even have to open its mouth to get a drink. All it has to do is step into water and the water wicks up its legs and disappears. Researchers don’t understand how this works, but it could give important clues to designing emergency gear to help humans collect water in the desert.
Other engineers are studying everything from beetles than can detect forest fires burning 60-miles away to the way flies buzz through the air and how geckoes scamper up and down walls.

They don’t want to build artificial beetles or flies or geckoes. They do want to understand how these creatures do it so they can use the same principles to build things humans can use.
An artificial fly, for instance, could be sent into a collapsed building through passages too small for humans to find and report on survivors buried in the rubble.
We’re not an artificial fly, but it’s time for us to buzz on out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Walter Groesel/stock.xchng

Getting your heart healthy again after a heart attack can be complicated. Engineers think they can help. We’ll see how – today, on Engineering Works!

More than a million people suffer heart attacks every year in the United States. Most of them survive, but that’s just the beginning. Just because you survive a heart attack doesn’t mean your heart is healthy. In fact, chances are that it’s been damaged – a lot or a little.

If you pull a muscle playing softball on the weekend, getting it healthy again isn’t hard. The first thing is don’t play softball for a while. Getting your damaged heart healthy again is more complicated. It can’t just stop pumping blood while it heals.

Biomedical engineers are working on a way to help your heart take it easy after a heart attack. It’s a device they call a direct cardiac compression device, or DCCD.

A DCCD is like an inflatable bag that fits around your heart and inflates and deflates as your heart beats. The bag inflates and presses in on your heart at the same time your heart contracts to pump blood. The extra pressure from the inflating bag means the heart muscles don’t have to work as hard to move blood through your veins and arteries.

For your heart, it’s like sitting on the bench instead of stepping up to the plate before your hamstring is healed.

Our heart feels fine, so we’ll wrap it up for today.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Francois Lariviere/iStock

Some people aren’t so sure using more ethanol fuel is a good idea. We’ll see what engineers think. Today, on Engineering Works!

If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know that not everybody thinks producing more ethanol fuel is a good idea. It’s not that most of them have anything against alcohol. They’re worried that since ethanol comes from corn, more ethanol means less corn for food. Especially for poor people around the world.

Engineers say people questioning the wisdom of using corn for fuel instead of food are asking the wrong question. Instead of choosing between fuel and food, they say, we need to be deciding what’s the best material to make alcohol fuel from. Guess what? It isn’t corn.

Chemical engineers are hard at work on processes that produce fuel-grade alcohol without a cornfield in sight. They’re using everything from sorghum and sugar cane to municipal solid waste and something called – water hyacinth – to produce alcohol. Sometimes more than from the same amount of corn.

In fact, one Texas A&M University chemical engineer is working out the details of an agreement to help the city of Laredo, Texas, produce alcohol fuel for its city vehicles – from sewage sludge.
Most of these non-corn alcohol production methods are still not ready for prime time. But they’re getting closer all the time.

We don’t know if we’re powered by corn or sewage sludge, but we’re done for now. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo:

It used to be that you could only find the bionic man or woman in science fiction. Biomedical engineers are changing that. Stay tuned.

If you wanted to see bionic arms or legs in action, you used to have to look back to 1970s television shows or Star Wars movies. Now, those fantasies are moving off the screen and into real life.

A young woman who lost an arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident is using a computer-controlled, electric-powered arm to do almost everything her own arm could do. Peel and eat a piece of fruit. Fold clothes. Even wash the dishes. And maybe best of all, all she has to do is think about what she wants to do, and it happens.

It works like this. Doctors moved the ends of the nerves that used to connect to her mangled arm to her chest. Electrodes on a harness detect tiny electric signals from those nerves and transmit them to a miniature computer. The computer translates them into signals that control small electric motors in her new arm and hand. When she wants to pick up an apple from the kitchen table, she thinks it and her arm, hand and fingers do it.

One problem — the arm and hand have no sense of touch. But everything else seems to be working fine.

Our arm isn’t computer controlled, but it’s still time to close the mike and leave. See you next time.

Photo: Jeff Hire

We’re so used to the wonders of high technology that it’s easy to forget there’s any other kind. Low-tech wonders, today on Engineering Works!

High technology seems to drive a lot of things these days, from the way we do business to who’s got the hottest new phone. But if you live in a remote village in the developing areas of Africa or Latin America, that super-fast new processor is pretty much irrelevant. You’ve got other things on your mind. Like shucking the corn that’s going to feed you and your animals until the next harvest.

Folks like these are getting help from engineers that are thinking about new ways to apply old-fashioned low technology to problems that have nothing to do with computers or new high-rise office buildings. This isn’t stepping backward in engineering. It’s understanding how to think about problems in a new way, understanding that sometimes the simple way works better.

Like a portable pedal-powered corn shucker built from worn-out bicycle parts. The idea came from a conversation with a bicycle mechanic in Tanzania. It had to be easy to build, cheap, and something farmers could move from one farm to another. Or the two-dollar charcoal briquette maker. The whole thing is about two inches long and can mold briquettes from almost anything that’ll burn. Rice hulls. Ground up cornstalks. Sawdust.

Our watch is a complicated way to figure out what time it is, but we’re still running out of it. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Jay Simmons/stock.xchng

Let’s listen to the sound of radiation. Today, on Engineering Works!

The first time most people heard of radiation was probably when we dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The destruction and death they caused made radiation scary.

But radiation has been around for as long as there’s been an earth. Millions of years.

Each of us is bombarded every second of every day by radiation from space. From the ground. Cosmic rays. If you like to tan by the pool, that’s radiation, from the sun. If you stay in the shade, you’re still getting radiation from the ground. In central Texas, where we live, it’s about 23 millirems a year. In Denver, it’s about 90 millirems.

In case you’re wondering, a millirem is one-thousandth of a rem, a Roentgen Equivalent Man. Rems measure radiation exposure. Like using inches to measure distance.

Ready for more? If you travel a lot, you’ll get about 1 millirem for every thousand miles you fly. Don’t travel? A year’s worth of watching TV adds one millirem. Smoke detector in your house? That’s eight-thousandths of a rem. Got an x-ray with your annual physical? 40 millirems more.

Live near a nuclear power plant? Compared to the other stuff that bombards you with radiation, it’s pretty puny – nine-thousandths of a rem. About like your smoke detector. A coal-fired power plant gives you more than three times as much, but it’s still pretty small.

We’re ready to stop radiating words. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Jesper Noer/stock.xchng

How many engineers does it take to make a better light bulb? We’ll find out, today on Engineering Works.

The round incandescent light bulb we all know hasn’t changed much since Thomas Edison invented it 125 years ago. Thin wires, called filaments, inside the glass bulb glow when electricity zips through them. That glow gives us light to see by. But there’s a hitch. Only about a tenth of that energy gives us light. The rest just heats the bulb so we can burn our fingers. Ouch!

Fluorescent lights – those long tubes that light offices and other commercial spaces – appeared in 1938. Instead of filaments, fluorescent tubes are filled with a gas that glows when electricity passes through it. They’re lots more efficient.

Fluorescent lights are cool. Really. They don’t get hot, and they need just one-fourth the energy incandescent bulbs need to produce the same amount of light. And fluorescent bulbs last 10 times longer than incandescent ones. They had problems, though. They didn’t fit a lot of places regular light bulbs did. And they hummed.

Then, compact fluorescent lamps entered the picture in the 1980s. They solved a lot of the problems regular fluorescents had: they screw into regular light sockets; they’re small enough to fit most places a conventional bulb will fit; they don’t hum; and they’re as stingy with the energy they use as regular fluorescent bulbs.

Guess it’s time to turn out the lights for today.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Husqvarna

Be honest. Nobody likes to cut the grass. But what if your lawnmower did the lawn by itself? We’ll take a look. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody likes their lawn to be green and neat. But if your lawn is a big one, you can spend hours keeping the grass trimmed to the height you like. Not fun.

Engineers don’t like to spend time following a lawnmower around the yard any more than we do. So they figured out a way not to.

Enter the robot lawnmower. We’re not kidding — a lawnmower that starts up by itself, mows the lawn and goes back to where it lives. All by itself, once you’ve set it up. It’s not especially complicated — no electronic maps of your yard, no GPS receivers. Just a grass-level antenna and a receiver that keeps track of where the mower is in relation to that antenna. And the ability to follow a pattern it’s cut before.

Robot lawnmowers are electric, so they’re quiet. And since you’re not watching where the mower is going, you could program one to mow your yard while you sleep, if you wanted to.

They’re not cheap. Robot mowers run about $1,500 each. But some people are willing to pay a lot for the extra time they’ll gain from not having to mow their lawns each weekend.

Our lawn is getting shaggy and the only robot pushing our mower is us. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: G&A Scholiers/stock.xchng

Everybody knows about cloth. Fabric. It’s that stuff your jeans are made of. Engineers are turning fabric into stuff Levi Strauss never dreamed of. We’ll do more than dream. Today. On Engineering Works!

Cloth. Fabric. Textiles. Whatever you call it, it’s been around a long time. As long as civilization, probably. Mostly it’s been used for clothes. It’s also carpets. Furniture upholstery. Sails for boats. Now, engineers are weaving threads into stuff you’d never imagine.

How about a knitted bag that helps a failing heart pump blood? A jacket that conducts electricity through its threads and keeps you warm. Or valves in automobile engines, braided from carbon fibers.

Using cloth in unusual ways is nothing new. Roman engineers used burlap to help stabilize their famous roads. Automobile tires use fabrics to make them strong and durable. That hasn’t always worked quite the way the engineers planned.

Nylon fabric in tires in the 1960s used to flatten out if they stood still for a while. Then the flat spot in the tire thumped until it warmed up again. Oh, well. The reinforcing fabric in today’s tires don’t bump. They also get 80,000 miles before they wear out.

New fabrics pretty much define high-tech. A German company has invented an outdoor jacket that plays MP3s. NASA is developing a spacesuit fabric that acts like a mousepad to control computers.

The fabric of this week’s show is just about worn out. We’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Image: Library of Congress

That’s the sound of iron turning into steel. With some help from your plastic water bottle. We’ll explain. Today, on Engineering Works!

Steel makes possible a lot of things we take for granted. Cars. Girders for big buildings. Knives that keep a sharp edge. Useful stuff, steel.

To make steel from iron, you mix the iron with processed coal – known as coke – and heat it. Really hot. That gets rid of impurities that make iron weaker and less durable than steel. Making steel uses a lot of coal, and materials engineers are looking for ways to replace some of it. Maybe as much as half – with plastic. Like your old water bottle.

Sounds goofy, huh? Not really. Plastic doesn’t look much like coal, but inside it’s almost the same. Hydrogen. Oxygen. And carbon. It’s the carbon that counts. Carbon – from coal or plastic – snags the oxygen in iron ore and takes it away. What’s left is steel. The problem is that the oxygen – in the form of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide – ends up in the air. Raw materials for smog and acid rain. Plus other bad stuff, like mercury.

Replacing coal with plastic sidesteps most of this. You still get some carbon dioxide when you replace coal with plastic, but it’s a lot less. And you get rid of a lot of plastic in the process, too.

We’re through processing our show for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Image: European Space Agency (ESA)

We’re going to talk trash like you’ve never seen — space junk. Today, on Engineering Works!

The next time you go outdoors, stop a minute and look straight up in the air. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a whole junkyard floating up above your head. It’s the stuff we’ve left behind from almost 50 years of space exploration.

Think about it. There’s so much junk in orbit up there that nobody knows for sure how much there really is. At least 100,000 pieces of stuff, maybe millions. More than 7,000 of them the size of a baseball or bigger. Some as small as chips of paint. In fact, a lot of it is chips of paint, from rockets and satellites. A few – broken down or worn-out satellites – are as big as washing machines.

Don’t snicker at those orbiting paint chips, either. They don’t sound like much, but they’re moving at more than 17,000 miles an hour. Anything moving that fast can do real damage if it hits something. One chip hit a window on the space shuttle. It gouged a crater as big as your thumbnail. Imagine what one of those dead satellites could do.

Engineers are designing shields to protect against collisions with orbiting junk. It’s a tough assignment – shields have to be strong enough to stop the junk before it hits anything important and light enough to lift into orbit.

Time to take out our trash. See you later.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

If you’re going to talk on your cell phone, you’ve got to keep the battery charged. Engineers and bugs may help. We’ll see how, today on Engineering Works!

Everybody has a cell phone these days. They’re everywhere. Some places, they’re the only phones there are. Consider Uganda. In rural Uganda fewer than one household in 100 is connected to the utility grid. No electricity. No landline telephone. But more and more people have cell phones. In developing countries, it’s cheaper and easier to build a cell network than a conventional landline system.

Of course, this brings another problem. How to recharge cell phone batteries without electricity to power the charger. This is where the engineers and the bugs come in.

Some engineering students have come up with a way to capture the energy that bacteria produce as they chow down on plant wastes to get electricity. It’s called a microbial fuel cell, or MFC. MFCs would be a perfect fit for electricity in rural areas of developing countries.

But don’t look for MFCs at your local big box store any time soon. The inventors are still early in the development process, and their prototype is kind of slow. It would take about six months to recharge a cell phone battery. But you can connect several together to get more power, and the engineers say future versions are likely to be more powerful still.

Our batteries are going flat, so we’re out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Everybody does it. Nuke it! Today on Engineering Works, we’ll find out how the biggest microwave oven you ever thought of makes food and other things safer.

Microwave ovens and food just seem to go together. They’re pretty handy. A minute or so and last night’s leftover fried rice turns into a tasty lunch today.

Food engineers are using a device sort of like a microwave on steroids to rid all kinds of food of unpleasant bacteria like salmonella and E-coli that can make us sick. It’s called irradiation.

Irradiation is causing quite a stir in the world of food. Some people think it’s a great idea. In one simple process, they say, food can be made safe from contamination by bacteria. And you can store irradiated food almost forever.

Other people think it’s scary. As soon as you say irradiation, they start thinking about things that glow in the dark.

Actually, we’ve been irradiating food for a long time; more than 90 years, in fact. And no one’s been contaminated yet by irradiated food. All the food the astronauts eat while flying the space shuttle or circling the globe on the international space station has been irradiated. And you’ve been using irradiated spices and cosmetics for years.

So the next time someone mentions irradiated food think of fried rice and astronauts and dig in. You’re in good company.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Old McDonald’s farm was never like this. We’ll spy on how satellites and other new technology are helping farmers keep track of their cows and corn — today on Engineering Works!

McDonald never heard of the global positioning system – GPS. But if he was farming these days, he’d probably be using global positioning system technology to keep track of his cows and all the other animals. GPS satellites, computers, new sensors and other high-tech tools are helping farmers “harvest�? information from their fields – information they can use to harvest more crops.

Sensors in this cornfield, for instance, are measuring how fertile the soil is.

GPS satellites overhead read where the sensors are, and the farmer’s computer puts the data together and draws a map to show which areas need more fertilizer, and what kind.

Other sensors “see�? where pests are chowing down on tasty crops, and map out where to apply insect killers. It’s all about making farming more efficient, doing the right things at the right time.

If you know exactly how much fertilizer and pesticide you need, and where you need it, you can be sure you’re applying enough without putting down too much. The same technology can also warn you about water pollution and other environmental problems before they get out of hand.

Bet Old McDonald wishes his farm was high-tech.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College
Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Computers are getting smaller all the time. Some engineers are taking this idea to extremes. We’ll check it out – today on Engineering Works!

These engineers are looking into a new field of science, or technology, called synthetic biology. The idea is to use living cells to do many of the things computers based on silicon chips do now, plus some other things – detect hazards, build structures, repair tissues and organs inside the body. It sounds like something out of a bad movie, but these guys are serious.

For instance, some electrical engineers have already programmed bacteria cells to glow red or green when they get a chemical signal from other bacteria cells. When they sense a high concentration of the signaling chemical, they glow green. When there’s less of the chemical, they glow red.

But that’s not all. One engineer has programmed cells so they make a red-and-green bull’s eye around the chemical that’s signaling them. Red close in where there’s more chemical. Green farther out, where there’s less.

The researchers are pretty excited about that bull’s eye. It could be the first step on the way to using programmed bacteria to build stuff, maybe fix things inside your body. If they can program the cells to turn colors, they think they can get them to deposit other stuff when they get the right signals.

We don’t know about our cells, but our program is just about over for this time. See you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

People have been building bridges for thousands of years, but there’s never been a bridge quite like a new one in Germany. We’ll check it out, today on Engineering Works!

Think about famous bridges and what do you get? The Golden Gate Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge. Verrazano-Narrows. If you’re an engineer, you might come up with the Tacoma Narrows bridge. Some are beautiful. Some cross spaces that are especially wide or deep.

The new bridge in Germany is pretty strange. First, instead of pavement, it carries water — over a river. The Elbe River. And instead of cars and trucks, it carries barges, big cargo barges with loads of anything from fuel oil to gravel or grain. This water bridge connects two important canals in central Germany and it lets the barges avoid having to motor along the Elbe River, which can be slow because parts of the river are pretty shallow. Sometimes the water is too low for the barges to move at all.

Building it was a huge project. It’s about half a mile long and deep and wide enough to float barges loaded with 1,500 tons of cargo. Engineers first started thinking about it in 1919. Then World War II and later the Cold War got in the way. But once the German engineers got started, they only spent six years in construction. And $600 million.

Well, our barge is here and it’s time to cross our bridge. See you on the other side.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: stock.xchng/Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo

There must be a joke here somewhere, but engineers are working on a better way to look into holes in the ground. We’ll see what’s going on, today on Engineering Works!

Unless we’re planting shrubs in the yard, most of us don’t spend much time thinking about holes in the ground. Some engineers think about them a lot. Most of the big things that engineers design and build start with a hole in the ground. These holes – for foundations, footings and things like that – are pretty simple as far as holes go.

It’s when you start excavating tunnels, mines or big underground chambers, that things get interesting. Being able to understand what’s going on with these holes is important. You want the holes to stay holes and not collapse on top of whatever you put into them. Not easy. It’s hard to see through rock and dirt.

Now engineers and computer experts are working up a way to use computed tomography – the same technology that goes into a CAT scan in the hospital – to get a clear look at what’s under there. The whole thing should be able to run out of a handheld personal data assistant, or PDA, that engineers on the site could carry with them.

They’re also working on a virtual reality program that will let the engineers walk through the hole they’re excavating before they’ve dug it out.

It’s time for us to get out of this hole. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

It’s a new kind of war. Fighting with bits and bytes instead of bullets and bombs — cyberwar, today on Engineering Works!

The tiny Baltic country of Estonia seems to be the first battlefield in this new kind of war. Computer engineers and security experts have worried about cyberwar for years. But nobody had ever started one — until now.

This war started when computers in Russia and around the world started flooding Estonian computer networks with data. So much data that many of them crashed. Imagine everything in Microsoft’s newest operating system downloaded onto your system, every six seconds — for 10 hours.

The attack almost shut down Estonia’s digital infrastructure. That’s saying something. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world. People there use the internet for everything — vote, pay taxes, shop, pay for parking.

The president and prime minister’s web sites crashed. So did computer systems at the parliament and other government departments. It was a near thing for the country’s biggest bank.
Good computer security and emergency planning seems to have saved Estonia from being shut down by this cyber attack, but security experts are worried about the next time.

What started the war? If you’re not Estonian or Russian, it seems pretty silly and we’re not going to go into it here. The Estonians say the Russians did it. The Russians say they didn’t. We don’t really care.

Nobody’s attacking our system, but we’re still out of data. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo courtesy Andy Shaffer/stock.xchng/

Today, we’re going to get into the zone – the construction zone – on Engineering Works.

Everybody likes a smooth commute. Nobody likes to see traffic backing up for a construction zone. Even when construction crews are busy repairing or improving roads and streets, we still need to get the kids off to school and get to work ourselves. But it seems like everywhere we drive these days, we run into highway construction.

Well, not exactly. Engineers spend a lot of time and trouble making sure we don’t run into the construction. Portable concrete barriers are one way to keep traffic moving alongside the jackhammers and asphalt spreaders and protect construction workers from wayward vehicles.

For years, these concrete barriers were 32 inches high – about the height of your desk, at work. These barriers worked well for one-way traffic through the work zone. But when you added oncoming traffic, the number of crashes went up.

Here’s why. When the traffic is two-way, drivers pulling out of side roads and driveways couldn’t see over the 32-inch-high barriers. And at night, oncoming headlights were hard to see.

Engineers at the Texas Transportation Institute found that shorter concrete barriers could still do the job. They developed a low-profile design – only 20 inches tall. The shorter height makes oncoming and cross traffic easier to see. The result? Fewer construction zone crashes.

That’s the end of the road for today. See you on down the highway.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo courtesy Patrick Moore/stock.xchng/

Engineers have always been willing to think big. We’ll look at one of the biggest ideas ever. Today, on Engineering Works!

Big problems often need big ideas to fix them. Probably the biggest problem facing us today is global warming. And engineers around the world are thinking of some really big ways to deal with it. Like re-engineering the earth to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Science fiction writers have written for years about re-engineering, or terraforming, Mars and Venus so people could live there. That’s fiction. The engineers are serious about the stuff they think we might try here on Earth. Here’s a sample.

How about fertilizing the oceans with iron? Some scientists think more iron in the ocean could lead to more plankton. More plankton might take a lot of the carbon dioxide out of the air. That might slow or stop global warming.

A really science-fiction-sounding idea is to use high-powered lasers and radio waves to spin carbon dioxide out into space from over the South Pole. Or how about spraying clouds with seawater so they’d reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth.

Most of the other ideas sound pretty goofy, too. Some might actually work. But there’s no way to tell from here. Or what else might happen that we wouldn’t like.

Oh, well. At least they’re thinking about it.
We’ve used up our supply of good ideas for the day and we’re through. See you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: www.stock.xchng.com

Listen close. If you’re a kid, or you’ve ever been one, chances are you know what this sound belongs to. Do you know? We’ll find out if you’re right, today on Engineering Works!!

Did you guess? You’re right, of course. It’s that silly engineering marvel, the Slinky.

The toy generations of kids know as the Slinky was born by accident on a U-S Navy ship during World War II. Naval engineer Richard James was trying to design a way to use springs to insulate fragile shipboard instruments from shocks and vibration. He got the idea for the Slinky when one of his experimental springs walked off a shelf and down onto the deck. As it turned out, the Navy never used James’ idea. But when he got home after the war, he and his wife perfected the steel ribbon spring toy we all know today.

The Slinky was an instant success. The Jameses sold their first four-hundred Slinkys within an hour and a half of when they offered the springy toys for sale.

Most of us still think of Slinkys as toys. But they have their serious side, too. The springy steel spirals have been used to build everything from radio antennas to light fixtures and pecan pickers. Physics teachers use them in class to demonstrate cool stuff like – wave properties – forces – and – energy states.

The Slinky has even made it to the big screen, in the “Toy Story” movie series.

Time’s up. It’s time for us to slink away.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FMin College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force

They’re the ultimate in radio-controlled model airplanes. UAVs. Today on Engineering Works!

Almost everyone played with model airplanes when they were kids. Powered by wound-up rubber bands or tiny gasoline engines. Some of our friends really got into it and flew them by radio control. UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, are the ultimate radio-controlled airplane. They’re powered by engines like snow mobiles, and they navigate with autopilots and GPS and look around with video cameras and advanced radar. Some can stay up in the air for 24 hours at a time.

UAVs look a lot different from the model airplanes we flew as kids. Not too surprisingly, they’re a lot bigger. Some are 30 feet long and have wings almost 50 feet across. The military uses UAVs a lot in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Technicians flew the little aircraft into inaccessible areas to find enemy troop concentrations and guide coalition troops to their locations.
UAVs also have launched missiles at terrorists. UAVs are important to the military because they can watch or attack enemy troops without risking a live pilot. We’re still a ways from being able to replace manned military aircraft with UAVs, but that’s where planners are headed. They also can be used to patrol borders and conduct research.

It’s time to fire up our UAV and fly on out of here. We’ll talk to you later.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo courtesy Istock.com

We humans think we’re pretty smart. Sometimes we can use help from the animals. Animalbots, today on Engineering Works!
Many – maybe most – robots in use today have a big problem. They work fine in the lab or on a factory floor. But when you try to move them out into the real world, they get into trouble.
Engineers are finding that animals can give them valuable suggestions on how to make robots that work.
The idea is not that the new robots look like animals or solve problems the same way, but that they do the same things. It’s a big difference. For instance, a robot designed to move like a crab uses only four motors to control each leg. Engineers had expected they’d have to use 18 motors because crabs use 18 muscles to move each leg. Four is simpler and accomplishes the same thing.
Likewise, most robots depend on high-powered computer processing and arrays of sensors to understand and deal with the environment around them. Animal-inspired robots often use a simpler approach. When a sophisticated robot gets into a tight place, its computer tries to figure out what’s going on and what to do about it. When animals get into tight places, they don’t think much. They keep wiggling and squirming and eventually they get out.
Animalbots do the same thing. They just keep moving until they get free.
You can’t see us, but we’re starting to wiggle. Time to go. We’ll see you later.
Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.