As you probably know already, today (Thursday, April 22) is Earth Day, which means it’s time to celebrate the achievements of environmental engineers everywhere.  So here’s a collection of news items highlighting the efforts of engineers to improve the state of our home planet. For more information about Earth Day events in your area, check the official Earth Day Network site.

Road Hogs

Farm power is back, and this time the pigs are on duty. Innoventor, a design and engineering firm, has teamed with researchers at the University of Illinois to develop a special reaction process that turns pig manure into biofuel. The swine fuel is being tested as a low-grade asphalt binder, and has been used to pave a stretch of highway  in St. Louis.

Students Design Eco-topia

Back in November, we blogged about the Future City design competition, and now the results are in. Congrats to the team from North Carolina’s Davidson IB Middle School, whose model for a self-sustaining city in Madagascar beat out over 1,000 entries, nabbing first prize. View more details of this amazing futuristic green city in the video above.

Ocean Update

Recently, there’s been a slew of exciting news in the field of ocean engineering. Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution have created a new acoustic imaging system to allow scientists to view the ocean floor in high definition. Meanwhile, California has opened a large desalination plant that will soon make it possible for residents to drink water from the Pacific Ocean, and the Navy is testing a submarine engine that runs solely on power derived from ocean currents.

Earth to NASA

This year, NASA’s Earth Day gift might be the best of all: NASA Earth Exchange (or NEX, for short) is a colossal, 128-screen data-crunching monster, set to revolutionize our understanding of global climate change. Already, NEX has been able to “cobble together half-trillion-pixel snapshots of global vegetation change over the past 30 years in just ten hours,” reports PopSci, a task that would have usually taken months to compute.

Extra

We close with some stunning images of the recent volcanic explosion in Iceland – reminder of the awe-inspiring, often unpredictable forces of Planet Earth, and science’s ongoing efforts to understand and track them.

Pig Image: The Pug Father/Flickr

Filed under: Aerospace, Agricultural, Chemical, Computer, e-News, Electrical, Environmental, Ocean

Tags: Aerospace, Agricultural, Competitions for Students, Computer, Energy, Environmental, Ocean, Volcanoes