Recent mechanical engineering graduate Andy Benn isn’t used to having time on his hands. Spending an afternoon playing tennis and eating lobster rolls, is well, unprecedented for the former Baja team captain who said he was clocking 80 to 100 hours a week in the auto shop in the basement of Richards Hall before graduating ...
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 ...
When mechanical and industrial engineering professor Yingzi Lin was pursuing her PhD in vehicle engineering, one of the driver test subjects became so distracted by the sensing equipment in the vehicle (the researchers were collecting data about his physiological state while driving), that he got into an accident. This experience got Lin thinking, “how could ...
In a letter to his close friend geologist Charles Lyell, Charles Darwin once wrote, “I care more about the Drosera than the origin of all the species in the world.” He had become obsessed with the carniverous plant, which wraps when it receives signal from its tentacles that nitrogen is nearby. A fly or a ...