2011 was another busy year for engineers all over the world. From inventing a device that turns air into water to exploring the oceans in a tiny submarine, scientists and engineers are exploring uncharted territory.

Like last year, we at eGFI have chronicled the most awe-inspiring innovations and stories, so in case you missed one, we present:

The Most Popular, Interesting, Weird, or Just Plain Cool eGFI Blog Posts of 2011

	Turning Air into Water
	Jetman: Flying Soon to a Landmark Near You
	Vertical Forest Coming Soon to Milan
	And Now: Flavor-Shifting Ice Cream
	Solar Decathalon 2011 Powers Up
	The World’s Sweetest Printer
	Water Bottles to Illuminate a Million Homes
	Airbus Presents a Futuristic Vision of Air Travel
	Students Create an App to Diagnose Malaria
	Berkeley Engineers Help Student Walk
	Underwater Scooters are the New SCUBA
	Virgin Oceanic Goes Many Leagues Under the Sea
	Cynthia Breazeal Wants You to Make Friends with Robots
	New Shirt Measures Athletes’ Performances
	Watson vs. The World

Like our new magazine cover? Snatch up the 44″ x 25″ poster

What do the blockbuster movie Avatar, high-performance sports gear, the Angry Birds phone app, and pollution-eating bacteria have in common? They are among a host of fascinating innovations developed by engineers and featured in the newest edition of the American Society for Engineering Education’s (ASEE) Engineering, Go For It magazine.

The publication is now available in our online store. You can find a free preview of the magazine here.

The kid-friendly magazine is part of ASEE’s campaign to inspire more K-12 students, particularly young women and underrepresented minorities, to pursue engineering careers. Illustrating how engineers make a difference in the world, the new edition includes:

• Stories featuring robots that imitate animals, Hollywood special effects, clean energy innovations, and technological advances giving athletes a winning edge.
• Engaging profiles on an array of engineering careers and disciplines.
• Fresh, cutting-edge examples of engineering innovations that are transforming fields from aerospace and medical care to architecture and materials science.
• Interviews with eight students currently participating in the Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Scholarship sponsored by the Department of Defense and administered by ASEE

In addition to producing a print magazine, eGFI blogs weekly for students and teachers, and can be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Imagine if someone gave you up to $41,000 in cash to realize your dreams. That – plus full tuition and other education-related benefits – is what the SMART scholarship offers students majoring in science, engineering and mathematics. SMART scholars also get paid summer internships and a job placement after graduation.

ASEE invited eight current SMART scholars to spend a day in Washington, D.C., and talk about what got them into engineering:

Brian Wybrecht
Civil Engineering

Carlos Manuel Torres, Jr.
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ebone Pierce
Mechanical Engineering

Isabel Anderson
Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering

Jaclyn Mathis
Materials Engineering

Lonnie T. Parker
Electrical and Computer Engineering

Nicholas Silva
Electrical Engineering

Tamara Cottam
Aerospace Engineering

Dillard University, New Orleans, La.

Mechanical Engineering & Physics

“I really chose to become a mechanical engineer because I love to build and create things that will benefit others. I love to help people, and to see a smile on their faces is when I feel most accomplished.”

A mosquito-blasting laser gun is a sensible weapon for fighting malaria — but a smartphone? Turns out that high-def touchscreen might be good for more than video chatting and slinging angry birds.

Five graduate students have designed a smartphone app for the 2011 Imagine Cup that will allow doctors to quickly and accurately diagnose malaria. It works by analyzing data from the phone’s camera – which has been outfitted with a microscopic lens – to determine whether malarial parasites are present in blood samples. The team won second place in the Imagine Cup Software Design National Finals.

Lifelens, as the project is called, could be especially useful in Sub-Saharan Africa, where malaria kills thousands of children every day. The only malaria tests given in this region consist of cotton swabs that change color when in contact with infected blood, although this method results in about a 60% incidence of false positives. Because of its unreliability, billions of dollars are wasted every year medicating those who aren’t sick.

Through sharp digital photography and a robust image-analyzing algorithm, Lifelens promises to more accurately assess blood samples so that malaria medication can be delivered to more people in need of it. Modern GPS will even allow health workers to pinpoint the exact location of each infection and track disease trends, so that patients can be treated more rapidly.

Currently Lifelens is being field tested, and the team is looking forward to collaborating with Harvard labs to further develop the project. Future possibilities include detecting other blood-bourne illnesses, like sickle cell anemia.

Here’s a great interview with Lifelens software developer Tristan Gibeau, a computer engineering student at the University of Central Florida:

A video presentation of the project:

Image:
Lifelens

Every once in a while, an engineer comes along whose work combines different disciplines in a way that is both fascinating and inspiring. Natalie Jeremijenko is one such engineer. A modern-day Renaissance woman, Jeremijenko challenges traditional approaches to problem solving with such initiatives as zip-lines to speed kids to school or The Environmental Health Clinic, where “im-patients” come in with environmental health concerns and leave with creative prescriptions to help solve these issues:

Making no distinction between science and art, she develops unconventional, even playful projects for museums and educational applications alike.

Jeremijenko’s career path so far has been anything but boring. After completing academic work in a variety of fields, organizing a rock festival, and speaking at the 2010 TED conference, she now serves as an associate professor of visual art at New York University. She has completed graduate and Ph.D.-level work in an astonishing variety of fields, including history, neuroscience, mechanical engineering, computer science, and electrical engineering, and is uniquely skilled at blurring the lines between these disciplines through interactive, experimental art.

In this TED talk she highlights a few of her recent projects:

Her work is described as experimental design, hence xDesign, as it explores opportunities presented by new technologies for social and political change. For example, in 2005 Jeremijenko introduced a pack of environmentally-sensitive, “feral” robotic dogs to various student groups in the NYC area. These toy dogs had been reprogrammed to detect chemical pollutants and then “set loose” in local parks to patrol. Upon sensing contamination, they bark, roll over, and play dead. Other projects of hers include installations of cloned trees in pairs in various urban micro-climates, a statistical index linking the Dow Jones to the suicide rate at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, and interactive interfaces for zoos.

No matter what media and methods are employed, it’s clear that Jeremijenko’s unique marriage of art and engineering is one that will continue to surprise, delight, provoke, and educate a multitude of minds.

It’s not edible, but this new fiber could be the right medicine for persistent wounds.

A fluffy new material composed of glass fibers could be the latest in wound-healing technology, say researchers from Missouri University of Science and Technology. This cotton candy-like substance (pictured above) is composed of borate glass nanofibers and has been labeled DermaFuse.

As its name suggests, DermaFuse works to meld with the patient’s tissue by mimicking the microstructure of blood clots. As the material dissolves, alkaline chemicals are released into the wound that kill bacteria and speed the growth of new blood vessels.

This technology could be especially useful in treating venous stasis, a condition sometimes found in diabetics that causes wounds to take a very long time (up to years) to heal and sometimes results in bad infections and amputations. A clinical test in 2010 found that most subjects with difficult-to-heal wounds saw improvements just days after applying the new material.

Dr. Delbert E. Day, professor emeritus of ceramic engineering (a subdivision of materials engineering) at Missouri S&T and co-creator of DermaFuse, forsees widespread use of nanotech bandages, from household first aid kits to the battlefield. His team will soon test the healing fluff on a wider variety of patients, including burn victims.

People who suffer from pancreatitis, a sudden inflammation of the pancreas, can experience severe stomach pain, nausea, fever, shock, and even death.

In order to detect pancreatitis quickly, biochemistry researchers at University of Texas at Austin have developed a sensor the size of a matchbox using only aluminum foil, gelatin, a 12-cent LED light, and a few other inexpensive materials.

The sensor relies on a two-step process to diagnose the disease. In step one, a bit of blood extract is dropped onto a layer of gelatin and milk protein. If there are high levels of trypsin, an enzyme that is overabundant in the blood of patients with acute pancreatitis, the trypsin will break down the gelatin in much the same way it breaks down proteins in the stomach.

In step two, a drop of sodium hydroxide (lye) is added. If the trypsin levels were high enough to break down that first barrier, the sodium hydroxide can trickle down to the second barrier, a strip of Reynold’s wrap, and go to work dissolving it.

The foil corrodes, and with both barriers now permeable, a circuit is able to form between a magnesium anode and an iron salt at the cathode. Enough current is generated to light up a red LED. If the LED lights up within an hour, acute pancreatitis is diagnosed.

The sensor has a number of potential uses, most notably in developing countries or after a natural disaster where more complex testing is difficult. The device’s speed also could make it worthwhile as a first-line measure, even in well-stocked hospitals.

Fun extra: check out this video of a gelatin cube being dropped onto a hard surface at 6,200 frames per second:

Image: University of Texas at Austin

Former Jeopardy champion contestants face off against Watson in a test run at IBM Research Labs

It may just be the greatest man vs. machine matchup since chess champion Garry Kasparov squared off against Deep Blue.

This week, the two most celebrated and successful players in Jeopardy history matched wits in a three-day competition against Watson, an IBM supercomputer, and, as many predicted, the artificial intelligence program won by a landslide.

Brad Rutter, who holds the shows record for the most winnings at $3.25 million, and Ken Jennings, who holds Jeopardy’s longest winning streak of 74 games, bravely went up against a computer that can sort through several hundred million pages of information in seconds. At the end of the day, Watson’s winnings amounted to $77,147, with Jennings and Rutter finishing with $24,000 and $21,400 respectively.

Watson, named after IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, took over four years to make and is a significant step toward more sophisticated artificial intelligence. The data stored in Watson (over 15 terabytes of it) was acquired through the Internet, books, and journals, and the program can understand human language and answer questions through reasoning and machine-learning technologies.

Watson’s language-parsing ability is what sets it apart from other supercomputers. Understanding the nuances of human speech and communication remains one of the greatest challenges in the field of AI, so creating a computer that can compete on a quiz show both demonstrates remarkable progress and opens the door to many future developments.

Currently, search engines are keyword-oriented. But if computers could pick apart jargon, riddles, and even sarcasm, then search engines could be powered by intelligence instead of just keywords. Applications for such powerful technology include a forthcoming collaboration between IBM, Columbia University, and the University of Maryland to create a cybernetic doctor’s assistant, and potentially a robotic shopping and technical support guru for a major electronics retailer.

So should we all be preparing to, as Ken Jennings humorously wrote in his final Jeopardy response, “welcome our new computer overlords?” Not so fast, explains David Ferucci, a lead researcher from Watson’s development team. In yesterday’s New York Times article he likens Watson to the helpful computer on Star Trek, rather than the malicious HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey: “HAL’s not the focus, the focus is on the computer on Star Trek where you have this intelligent information seek dialog, where you can ask follow-up questions and the computer can look at all the evidence and tries to ask follow-up questions. That’s very cool.”

Check out this video to see why playing Jeopardy is the ideal way to test Watson:

Think you’ve got what it takes to outsmart Watson? Try your hand at the New York Times’s Watson Trivia Challenge.

Images:

IBM/Facebook

With the aid of supercomputers, we may soon have a new, extraordinary understanding of the human brain

Imagine a football stadium filled with 100,000 people on laptops, all networked together and working to solve the same computing problem. Now triple that number, and you’ll have the approximate computing power of some of the world’s most advanced supercomputers.

Machines like Jaguar and Kraken, both at the University of Tennessee, have a processing speed of about two petaflops, which means they can perform about 10¹⁵ calculations per second. Researchers are currently working towards exascale computing (that is, crunching over 10¹⁸ calculations per second), and some predict this may even be possible by the year 2020.

So why, one might ask, do we need supercomputers this powerful? Sebastian Seung, a researcher in Computational Neuroscience and professor of Physics at MIT, has at least one important answer.

His project, explained beautifully in this 2010 TED Talk (below), involves mapping the interconnections between billions of individual neurons in the human brain, a goal of unprecedented scale and complexity. Results of Seung’s research could potentially alter our understanding of the brain in significant ways, and might lead to increased knowledge of which neural networks are important in diseases like Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia.

Because adult human brains contain an estimated 100 trillion (10¹⁴) synapses, modelling such an intricate organ will take massive amounts of computing power.

The process of creating a complete neural map, or a “connectome” as it has recently been called, is painstakingly long and detailed. Computers must be taught to scan vast amounts of electron microscopic images of brain slices, interpret and trace their neural connections, and eventually piece together an intricate 3D model of the brain.

Obtaining such a map would be an achievement comparable to the decoding of the human genome, MIT News writes. In 2009, the National Institutes of Health announced a five-year, $30 million initiative called the Human Connectome Project, which funds labs like Seung’s in an effort to advance our understanding of the brain.

Image: dierk schaefer/Flickr