For many civil engineers, the annual steel bridge competition might as well be the Super Bowl. It’s a big deal — university teams all over the country spend many months, and many late nights, coming up with a bridge design, fabricating the pieces, and building their own personal masterpiece. The bridges are serious, too: they ...
Civil and environmental engineering professor Philip Larese-Casanova has had a life-long love affair with metals. In his work in aquatic environmental chemistry, he looks at how metallic pollutants transform and behave in freshwater systems. “I just had an interest in the metals,” he told me in an interview last month. “Maybe it’s because I see ...
Engineers are good at tracking things. That’s according to Northeastern graduate student, Sarah Brown. As a fellow of Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, Brown is collaborating with researchers at both Draper and Northeastern to track something that has never really been tracked before: emotion. Well, let me rephrase that. Emotion has been tracked before, but not ...
Forty years ago, Dupont Company revolutionized protective gear when they introduced Kevlar, a fiber made of super-strong, rigid polymer molecules belonging to a small class called aramids. Since then, improvements to strong textile fibers have been incremental. That’s because most flexible polymers are inherently flimsy. When you look at their micro-structures it’s easy to see ...
Here’s a great video produced by the DHS Center of Excellence, ALERT, or Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (what is it about engineers and acronyms?!). ALERT 101 is a new series featuring the center’s unique technologies and research areas. This one explains millimeter wave and back scatter airport screening systems. For more info on ...
Of the three ways we can dry our hands after scrubbing down, the paper towel method tends to be the most hygienic. When I asked chemical engineering professor and chair Tom Webster how this could possibly be, he told me that air dryers can actually blow bacteria onto other surfaces, causing further contamination down the ...
When I was in high school I read a book called Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice that I thought was going to define the rest of my life (I’ve always been kind of dramatic like that). It was about discovering the chemical compounds found in plants that cultures have been using for centuries, even millennia, ...
From solar panels to high-resolution imaging, a host of advanced technologies relies on the manipulation of light waves. Engineers have traditionally bent light beams toward a desired focal point using glass lenses, according to Hossein Mosallaei, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University. But lenses are bulky and curved, limiting their ability ...
This month’s issue of the National Science Foundation newsletter, Current, highlights civil and environmental engineering professor Auroop Ganguly. The article talks about Ganguly’s work modeling future water availability using various scenarios of population growth and climate change. The article also references a video of Ganguly being interviewed for Live Science in collaboration with the NSF. ...
Uterine fibroids. Not something most of us like to talk about. What are they? Calcified deposits stuck to the lining of a woman’s uterus. Are they common? Yes. Are they dangerous? Not usually. Painful? Yes — when they get big enough….and they can weigh up to several pounds. Also, they can range from very soft ...
Talk about making complex topics accessible to the general public — this video from PhD candidate Margery Hines does such a good job explaining ground penetrating radar (GPR) for landmine detection, it won the Judges’ Choice Award at the 2012 NSF IGERT Online Video & Poster competition. Cover photo via Flickr.
Academic Minute is a radio podcast that features researchers from colleges and universities around the world, keeping listeners abreast of what’s new and exciting in the academy. In June, electrical and computer engineering professor Carey Rappaport spoke about his work developing a new generation of body scanners that provide an increase in security and privacy ...