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I am an engineering washout. I left a chemical engineering major in shame and disgust to pursue the softer pleasures of a liberal arts education. No, do not pity me, gentle reader; do not assuage your horror and dismay at my degradation by flinging a filthy quarter into my shiny tin cup. Instead, hear my story, and learn why the United States lacks engineers. Not long ago, I showed up for my first year at Smartypants U., fresh from a high school career full of awards and honors and gold stars. My accomplishments all pointed towards a more verbal course...

Plans by the United States to return to manned space exploration, with the moon as the first step in 2018, reflect a desire to maintain U.S. leadership in the scientific world as much as it does to set foot on other planets in the solar system. The U.S. space agency recently unveiled a $104 billion project to send astronauts to the moon by 2018 with a design inspired by the Apollo program of the 1960s, which put the first men on the lunar surface. The administrator of NASA, Michael Griffin, recently set out the philosophical and political motivation for renewed...

YUKON, Okla. - NASA engineer and champion aerobatic pilot Marta Bohn-Meyer was killed Sunday when her plane crashed during practice for next week's National Aerobatic Championships. The crash occurred shortly before noon near Oklahoma City, where she was piloting her home-built Giles G-300 airplane. She had been joined there by her husband and fellow aerobatic pilot, Bob Meyer. "Flying and doing things with airplanes is my passion," she once said. "Given a choice, I'll go fly airplanes." According to the International Aerobatic Club, Bohn-Meyer had pulled into a vertical maneuver when the cockpit canopy came off. The airplane then crashed...

PA CARE Members: IEEE-USA has just posted an informative Action Alert on HB 1920, introduced into the Pennsylvania House of Representatives earlier this year. This bill is an attempt to reform your state's sales tax to provide funds for the state's local primary and secondary schools. One of the consequences of the bill would be the imposition of a 5% sales tax on engineers within Pennsylvania. IEEE-USA has not taken a position on the bill because we usually do not take positions on state legislation. However, it is going to impact our PA members, so we wanted you to know...

[..]America pays people to think thoughts that defy imagination, though it then often ignores their recommendations. In early 2001, experts with [FEMA] set out to rank the likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing America. According to the Houston Chronicle, they were a terrorist attack in New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a major hurricane in New Orleans.In this case, two out of three is bad.[..]"...A major earthquake or Category 5 hurricane in an urban area would stretch our current response and recovery capabilities to the breaking point."The date of this conference: Sept. 10, 2001.In the aftermath of the...

High speed actuators enable the robot’s fingers to move through 180 degrees in 0.1 second (Image: Akio Namiki/University of Tokyo) If robots are to inherit the Earth, then they should at least be able to catch. So say the researchers behind a bot that can match the most skilled human baseball player faced with a hurtling ball. The robotic catcher, developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, Japan, can comfortably grab a ball careering through the air at 300 kilometres per hour, or 83 metres per second, its creators say. And, of course, the robot never gets tired...

SIERRA VISTA - Gary Robertson is about to see every inventor's dream come true. The 53-year-old's lifetime ambition of having one of his creations go beyond the drawing board is finally set to be realized. Robertson's invention, called the Solar Tree, has been accepted as an original idea by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. With his patent pending, Robertson is now in the process of getting his new product manufactured with the help of a company called Invent-Tech. The father of five describes his invention as "an innovative new solar-powered home improvement product that will help lower utility bills."...

It seems like ancient history now, but Oct. 4, 1957, was a day that changed the world: The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the world's first artificial satellite. The United States also had been working toward the launch of a satellite, but the Soviet breakthrough caught this country and the world by surprise. The Space Age had dawned -- and the Space Race was under way. The jokes were sometimes bitter. ("Their German rocket scientists are better than our German rocket scientists!") But in truth, the United States had been bested by what widely was believed to be inferior technology...

Animal weaves strong glass For tips on building sturdy skyscrapers and bridges, you could consult engineering textbooks. Or you could plumb the frigid depths of the western Pacific. There, a not-so-humble sponge called Euplectella has been demonstrating fundamental principles of engineering since long before the dawn of skyscrapers, bridges or engineers. Euplectella weaves an intricate skeleton of glass. If you are a shrimp living inside this glass house, you can throw all the stones you want. This latticework is built to last, scientists from Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs report in today's issue of Science. "What is fascinating is that nature...

More than half a century of US dominance in science and engineering may be slipping as America's share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says. The study, written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, warned that changes in the global science and engineering job market may require a long period of adjustment for US workers. Moves by international companies to move jobs in information technology, high-tech manufacturing and research and development to low-income developing countries were just "harbingers"...

ore than half a century of U.S. dominance in science and engineering may be slipping as America's share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says. The study, written by Richard Freeman at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Washington, warned that changes in the global science and engineering job market may require a long period of adjustment for U.S. workers. Moves by international companies to move jobs in information technology, high-tech manufacturing and research and development to low-income developing countries were just "harbingers"...

Just read Enough by leftist environmentalist Bill McKibben. The book delves into germline genetic therapy, wherein a zygote's DNA can be altered. McKibben posits that within 50 years, the technology will exist for parents to select the eye color, hair color, and even personality of their kids (assuming that personality is about 50% nature and 50% nurture). He bemoans the fact that parents will be able to "stack the deck" by making a child more patient or pious. For example, McKibben notes that parents may be able to give a child the charitable outlook of Mother Theresa. Then, however, he...

Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade. The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked. "He would just say, 'It's easy, it's easy,' " said Ms. Serrin, who...

Light Speed a Barrier? To go, the children of tomorrow may have had to discover what is believed impossible today -- how to travel faster than light. Mel Zisfein, deputy director of the national Air and Space Museum, and an aerosynamicist amoung other things, has noted a similarity between the way most people today regard "C," the speed of light, and the way many people a generation or so ago regarded "a", the speed of sound. For this publication, he sketched the illustrations which appear on the following page, and drafted the following... "Some people used to look at...

A battery with a lifespan measured in decades is in development at the University of Rochester, as scientists demonstrate a new fabrication method that in its roughest form is already 10 times more efficient than current nuclear batteries—and has the potential to be nearly 200 times more efficient. Our society is placing ever-higher demands for power from all kinds of devices,” says Philippe Fauchet, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester and co-author of the research. “For 50 years, people have been investigating converting simple nuclear decay into usable energy, but the yields were always too...

Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones. But late in the article comes this quote from Dr. Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University: "The question," he said, "is whether ugly people have fewer offspring than handsome people. I doubt it very much. If the number of offspring are the same for these two categories, there's absolutely no evolutionary reason for parents to invest less in ugly kids."......this is the where evoltionary argument is going.....

What is common between a 400-unit housing scheme in Maryland, US and a 200-block residential complex in The Netherlands? Both schemes are among the several housing and commercial complexes for which the basic land development and designing has being carried out by Indian architects and civil engineers in India. As the country moves up the value chain in the knowledge process offshoring (KPO) domain, several companies that cater to the architectural, civil engineering and land development requirements or in short, the brick and mortar project design needs of overseas clients have cropped up. A typical start-up in the land development...

A knitted bag holds a weakened heart, helping it pump blood. Electricity flows through the threads of a battery-powered fleece jacket, keeping the wearer warm. Carbon fibers are braided into structures that look like mushrooms, but are actually prototypes of automotive engine valves. Other fibers are shaped into bicycle frames and sculling oars. Textiles are no longer just the stuff of clothing, carpets and furniture covering. Made of high-tech threads, they can also be found in lifesaving medical devices and the bodies of racing cars. One architect is proposing building a skyscraper out of carbon fibers. "I think there's more...

Stress kills 6 IT geeks The Asianage (3/29/2005 12:15:05 AM) Chennai, March 28: Six software professionals under the age of 33 have died and two top executives from renowned software companies have become paralysed because of stress-related heart ailments in the last six months in Chennai, says a study by Mitran Foundation, a Bangalore-based voluntary association of practising doctors. "All the six who died, and the two who became invalid, had no family history of heart attacks or any pre-history of heart ailments or paralysis. They were all in their prime, between 27 and 33 years, and handled challenging projects...

Vinod Dham is among a growing number of technology executives warning that the U.S. faces an engineer shortage. To stay globally competitive, he says, the nation must do better at steering its youth toward engineering careers. Mr. Dham knows how hard that is: He can't persuade his own kids to go into engineering. The 54-year-old Mr. Dham would seem to be a prime role model. His engineering degree lifted him from his humble origins in India into a 16-year career at Intel Corp., where he became well-known for helping create the Pentium chip. His older son, 22-year-old Ankush, is studying...