Free Republic

Blog: Note: The following blog entry is a quote: Iran, China Ink $17 Billion In Deals Asadollah Asgarowladi, director of the Iran-China trade bureau, has said that China has signed 18 economic contracts, worth $17 billion, with Iran in the areas of technology, engineering, infrastructure, and trade. Iran's Press TV reported that in 2008 there was $29 billion in trade between the two countries. Source: Press TV, Iran, May 18, 2009 Posted at: 2009-05-18

The Ancient World's Longest Underground Aqueduct Roman engineers chipped an aqueduct through more than 100 kilometers of stone to connect water to cities in the ancient province of Syria. The monumental effort took more than a century, says the German researcher who discovered it. When the Romans weren't busy conquering their enemies, they loved to waste massive quantities of water, which gurgled and bubbled throughout their cities. The engineers of the empire invented standardized lead pipes, aqueducts as high as fortresses, and water mains with 15 bars (217 pounds per square inch) of pressure. PHOTO GALLERY: ROME'S LONGEST PIPE In...

Viral Batteries: A Case for Evolution? by Brian Thomas, M.S.* Researchers at MIT have invented a “greener” battery with the help of viruses. Three years ago, they engineered a virus that coats itself with material that serves as an anode, a structure within a battery that attracts positive ions. They have now engineered a virus (bacteriophage) that serves as a cathode, which indirectly links to the anode to help make the battery functional. The result is a battery with little impact on the environment. National Public Radio (NPR) ran a report on its Morning Edition that compared the development of...

It was a chink in the armour that could have proved US dear. America’s nuclear-warhead upgrade was delayed as government laboratories forgot how to make crucial components. The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads, a government report states. Regarding a classified material codenamed ‘Fogbank’, a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that “NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff...

Flirtmeister, 101 by: Deborah Lambert, February 19, 2009 In Germany it appears that all work and no play still makes Hans a dull boy. That’s why German IT engineering students at the U. of Potsdam are leaving nothing to chance. Over 400 of them have signed up for a two-week course on the art of flirting. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the quickie course will provide a broad overview of the topic, including “how to write flirtatious text messages and e-mails, impress people at parties, and cope with rejection.” Local bon vivant Philip von Senftleben will be teaching...

The non-GMO Project Product Verification Program is Up and Running The governments of the US and Canada stand in sharp contrast to sixty other countries around the world, including the European Union, Russia, and China, by not requiring foods that contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to be so labeled. They do so despite good evidence that GMOs could have negative health implications for humans and the environment, and despite the fact that 87% of American consumers want products that contain GMO ingredients to be labeled. The Non-GMO Project is a non-profit originally formed by retailers whose customers were concerned about...

FRANKFURT, Germany – Siemens AG — rocked by a series of corruption cases that has cost the company both prestige and money — agreed Monday to pay more than $1 billion in fines in Germany and the U.S. as it moved a step forward in closing a dark chapter in its history. Munich-based Siemens agreed to pay more than $800 million in fines to settle long-standing corruption charges in the United States and another 395 million euros ($533.6 million) to European authorities. The announcements of the amounts of both fines came Monday. Siemens, which makes products ranging from wind turbines...

Title IXing Science, UT-Austin Style by: Bethany Stotts, November 07, 2008 As Accuracy in Academia’s executive director Malcolm Kline outlined in a recent article, proponents of Title IX have adopted the feminization of engineering programs as one of their key goals. Moreover, at a recent conference at St. Vincent College, Kline said that “At least one scholar even speaks openly of applying Title IX to scientific professions.” Gretchen Ritter of the University of Texas at Austin told a congressional committee in 2007 that “To support equal academic opportunities for these young women, we ought to use the leverage of federal...

DALLAS — Southern Methodist University will open an engineering laboratory that will be modeled after a Lockheed Martin research center considered among the most innovative in the world.SMU’s Lockheed Martin Skunk Works Lab will open in December 2009 and will draw heavily from the management style forged by the defense contractor. Lockheed’s Skunk Works plant in Palmdale, Calif., develops the nation’s fastest, most versatile military jets and systems. Skunk Works also has offices in Fort Worth, where Lockheed builds fighter jets. "Every groundbreaking technology that has produced an aircraft for the military has been thought about, tested and delivered by...

China's breathtaking transformation of their own country over the past couple of decades is accompanied by robust new Chinese enterprises all over the world. In this report on China's activities in Africa, the Chinese are seen to be involved in infrastructure projects across this vast continent. Everything about Africa is writ large - during the past twenty years, as China's economy exploded, Africa's population doubled. There are now over 900 million people living in Africa, and collectively the Africans have lower per capita wealth than the peoples of any other continent. But the potential in this vast land mass of...

AIRLINES are desperate. With jet fuel over $4 per gallon and still climbing, American, United and other major carriers are raising fares, cutting flights, trimming fleets and laying off pilots. They're also ordering fuel-efficient Boeing 787s and Airbus A350XWBs — the new generation of plastic planes. These new aircraft promise 20-percent-lower fuel consumption. Replacing heavier traditional aluminum alloys, 50 percent of their skins, panels and load-bearing structures are comprised of lighter, stiffer carbon-fiber-reinforced-plastic (CFRP) composites. Then add the latest, most fuel-efficient engine technology. Sounds good. But beneath these advantages danger lurks — novel maintenance challenges for which neither airlines nor...

It was probably the most ingenious student prank of all time. In June 1958, Cambridge awoke to see a car perched at the apex of an inaccessible rooftop, looking as if it were driving across the skyline. The spectacle made headlines around the world and left police, firefighters and civil defence units battling for nearly a week to hoist the vehicle back down before giving in and taking it to pieces with blowtorches. The shadowy group of engineering students who executed the stunt were never identified and the mystery of how they did it has baffled successive undergraduates and provided...

The enormous steel ball you see in the photos (and the incredible video below) is the world’s largest ‘tuned mass damper’ and sits near the top of the world’s largest completed skyscraper on earth, taipei 101 in taiwan. the idea behind a tuned mass damper is quite simple: as a building sways (resulting from high winds, earthquakes etc), its tuned mass damper, essentially a finely tuned and ridiculously heavy pendulum, will move in opposition to the structure’s oscillations and minimise any movement. if that makes no sense, watch the crude gif below. due to both the immense size of taipei...

It's sweltering in Boston, and a dozen Tufts University coeds are out in shorts and tanks, attracting the usual stares. Only today the stares are for a different reason: the girls are huddled around a 750-pound machine that looks like a spaceship, long and wide with a bubble-shaped cockpit open to reveal a mass of pipes and wires. It's actually a solar car—one they've built from the ground up and hope to race next year. Suddenly sparks fly, and the girls jump back. They may be engineering whizzes, but they know a hazard when they see one. They call a...

  In a move that will cheer up lovers of vehicles that can travel on both water and (very flat) land, students at a German engineering university have built a one-person hovercraft that uses an air thrust system to move and steer.Folks over at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences use a pneumatic propeller that pushes air through two channels. Each of the channels has a pair of flaps that behave like the thrust-reversing system of a turbo-drive to help a user easily maneuver left or right, go in reverse, and brake.The way the project is set up hints that...

Every nation could be described as a manifestation of a unique trait of character and most countries furthermore nurture, give emphasize to and celebrate this national identity of theirs. Some examples of such key national characters (please DO comment if you feel inclined to); USA: Liberty Italy: Creativity France: Refinement India: Spirituality Germany: Self-discipline Finland: "Sisu" (a Finnish term meaning "To have guts") Britain: Elevatedness Denmark: "Hygge" (a Danish word meaning "Good-naturedness", of mind as well as of deed) Spain: Passion China: Cultivation Russia: Chaos - just joking, I would actually say "Heart" (in the sense of having a big...

India's tech companies, interested in capitalizing on their success in drawing IT outsourcing business from U.S. and other Western countries, are examining what they need to do to capture a broader range of the engineering services business. The National Association of Software and Service Companies in Delhi, India's leading IT trade group, commissioned a study by Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., a McLean, Va.-based consulting firm, to examine the country's potential to gain a larger share of the offshore engineering services business, going beyond software engineering to a swath of industries, including automotive, aerospace, utilities, construction and industrial. The Booz Allen...

Mississippi State University, for the second consecutive year, earned top honors in the GM and US Department of Energy’s (DOE) Challenge X student engineering competition. Over the past nine months, the 2008 Challenge X: Crossover to Sustainability competition challenged 17 university teams from the US and Canada to re-engineer a Chevrolet Equinox that employs advanced powertrain technologies. The Mississippi State team designed a through-the-road parallel hybrid electric vehicle powered by a 1.9L GM direct injection turbo diesel engine fueled by biodiesel (B20). It used a GM F40 6-speed manual transmission and a Johnson Controls 300V NiMH battery pack in conjunction...

Oilfield services companies will need to join forces in the next few years to avoid a downturn of the sector's own making, the chief executive of French oil services company Technip SA (TKPPY) said Wednesday. That could mean merging with each other or, for the first time in decades, with energy companies, Technip CEO Thierry Pilenko said. During a panel at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, Pilenko floated the idea of international oil companies acquiring service firms as a way to manage a growing labor shortage facing the entire energy industry. International oil companies explore for and produce oil...

If the British and French can design and build spectacular bridges at a modest or at least reasonable cost, why can’t we? Or maybe we can, but we haven’t tried it lately, at least not in Oregon. The question comes up because Peter DeFazio, our man in Washington, is chairman of the highways and transit subcommittee in the U.S. House. His committee will write the next highway bill, probably by the end of 2009. And when DeFazio led his colleagues on a fact-finding trip to Europe, he saw the viaduct at Millau. It’s the most spectacular bridge he has ever...