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Category: engineering – Page 122

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In this not-quite-serious video I explain what it would take to terraform Mars and make it habitable for humans.

Images at 5 mins 50 seconds are from Dan Barker https://twitter.com/danbarker.

Screenshots at 7 mins 11 seconds are from https://www.themartiangarden.com/

Correction: At 1 minute 44 second it’s the mass that is a tenth that of Earth, not the gravitational pull, which is about 0.4 times that of Earth. The text shows the right numbers. Sorry about that.

Many thanks to Jordi Busqué for helping with this video http://jordibusque.com/

Continue reading “Terraforming Mars in 3 Just Simple Steps!” | >

The AstroAccess initiative is working to advance disability inclusion in space.

Twelve disability ambassadors will fly weightlessly on Sunday (Oct. 17) as part of an initiative to advance disability inclusion in space.

AstroAccess, the latest mission from the SciAccess Initiative, which aims to make STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) more accessible, will fly a crew of 12 disability ambassadors on a weightless parabolic flight. The flight will take off on Sunday from Long Beach, California, aboard Zero Gravity Corporation’s (Zero-G) “G-Force One” plane, which flies in a parabolic arc pattern that creates short periods of weightlessness in its cabin.

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Even in-13°F. Riding a motorbike feels almost as free as it could get when you’re on the road, and some say it can be addictive. While you can ride your bike almost anywhere, when you’re up at a mountain or under heavy snowfall, things are bound to get slippery. But a new, all-electric snowbike developed by Moonbikes, a French startup, can change that. Nicolas Muron, an aeronautical engineer, basically took the bus parts of an electric bike, the tracks, and skimboards of a snowmobile, and invented a hybrid between both vehicles using his state-of-the-art engineering know-how. The Moonbike is a simple way to get around in a snowy setting, and for easy mobility on snow, it has a rear track drive and a front skiboard instead of wheels. Full Story:

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AUSTIN, Texas — As much as a third of the world’s population does not have access to clean drinking water, according to some estimates, and half of the population could live in water-stressed areas by 2025. Finding a solution to this problem could save and improve lives for millions of people, and it is a high priority among scientists and engineers around the globe.

Scientists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin have created a hydrogel tablet that can rapidly purify contaminated water. One tablet can disinfect a liter of river water and make it suitable for drinking in an hour or less.

“Our multifunctional hydrogel can make a big difference in mitigating global water scarcity because it is easy to use, highly efficient and potentially scalable up to mass production,” said Guihua Yu, an associate professor in the Cockrell School of Engineering’s Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute.

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Tesla’s impressive third-quarter delivery performance overshadowed the automotive industry’s ongoing struggle with the semiconductor chip shortage. Among all of the world’s automakers, Tesla has been basically the only car company to avert the crisis as it has not had any overwhelmingly public stoppages in vehicle production. Morgan Stanley’s new investor note, drafted by lead analyst Adam Jonas, examines Tesla’s ability to avoid detrimental production stoppages, which effectively helped the company capture its best quarter in company history.

Jonas titles Morgan Stanley’s most recent investor note, “How Did Tesla Find Chips?” In all honesty, this riddle was solved during the Q2 2021 Earnings Call, where Tesla stated in its Shareholder Deck that it used a combination of in-house microcontrollers to avoid any major catastrophes in the manufacturing of its vehicles. The company wrote:

“Our team has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to react quickly and mitigate disruptions to manufacturing caused by semiconductor shortages. Our electrical and firmware engineering teams remain hard at work designing, developing and validating 19 new variants of controllers in response to ongoing semiconductor shortages.”

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Imagine an iPad or a Kindle for the blind, with inflatable Braille that changes shape under a user’s touch. A Cornell-led collaboration has made a crucial component for such a technology: A haptic array of densely packed actuators that cause silicone membrane “dots” to pop up when triggered by combustion.

The team’s paper, “Valveless Microliter Combustion for Densely Packed Arrays of Powerful Soft Actuators,” published Sept. 28 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The lead author is doctoral student Ronald Heisser.

One of the major hurdles for designing a dynamic Braille display for electronics is figuring out how to apply the necessary amount of force for each dot. Previous attempts have usually involved motors, hydraulics or tethered pumps, all of which are cumbersome, complex and expensive, according to Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering in the College of Engineering and the paper’s senior author.

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And, depending on how further studies progress, it could be implemented via gene therapy.

Early-stage pancreatic cancer has a ‘reset button’

“These findings open up the possibility of designing a new gene therapy or drug because now we can convert cancerous cells back into their normal state,” said Professor Bumsoo Han of Purdue’s mechanical engineering, who is also the program leader for the university’s Center for Cancer Research, in a blog post shared on the university’s official website. Han has also received a courtesy appointment in biomedical engineering, according to the post. The new time machine (speaking figuratively) from Han’s lab is a lifelike reproduction of a specific structure of the pancreas, called the acinus, which secretes and produces digestive enzymes into the small intestine. When pancreatic cancer strikes, it typically comes from chronic inflammation, which is caused by a mutation that tricks the digestive enzymes to begin digesting the pancreas itself. This is bad.

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