Women in Engineering Program at UT Austin @utwep - Tumblr Blog

2015 marked the 23rd consecutive year that IBMers topped the annual list of US patent earners–with 7,355 patents to be exact. Congrats you innovation fiends, and keep pumping out the inventions in 2016. And don’t forget to watch this animated short for Patent No. 9177257, a cognitive innovation that will one day help us remember things better →

#innovations

girlinalabcoat

Applications opened today for the Cards Against Humanity Science Ambassador Scholarship, a full-ride scholarship for women seeking undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The recipient of the award will receive full tuition coverage for up to four years, starting with the 2016 academic year.

#scholarships #stem #women in stem #outreach #scholarship #college

chicagoarchitecturebiennial

The MIT Self-Assembly Lab is Pioneering the Brave New World of “4D Printing”

MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab defines “self-assembly” as “ a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction.” In other words, the cross-disciplinary MIT team works to build materials and components that can then autonomously build themselves into larger structures. They have developed woods, polymers, balloons, magnets, and other materials that self-assemble in a variety of ways. Some are activated as they are submerged in water. Others are tumbled in cages like lottery balls until they find the right connection with other pieces. The Lab’s researchers believe that these prototype techniques could one day lead to major breakthroughs in a whole range of applied fields. For the Chicago Architecture Biennial this fall, members will be collaborating with the Gramazio Kohler research unit at ETH Zürich to debut a new method of self-assembly.

ted

We can’t wait for IKEA furniture to build itself on its own.

Learn more about how objects self-assemble right before our eyes. >>

#materials engineering #mechanical engineering #chemical engineering #innovations

howstuffworks

It’s Ada Lovelace Day! In honor of the woman who wrote the first algorithm (program) to be carried out by a machine, celebrate all women in STEM — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

#women in stem

discoverynews

New York to London by Car?

The Russian government has proposed building a cross-country superhighway that would link to both European and U.S. highway systems. If the Trans-Eurasian Belt Development, which would also include a high-speed rail system, eventually becomes a reality, it might be possible someday to drive from London to New York, by way of Siberia.

That’s about 13,000 miles, so be prepared to stop for a couple of oil changes along the way.

Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin unveiled the idea this spring, at a meeting of the Russian Academy of Science, according to the English-language website Siberian Times.

Yakunin didn’t specify exactly how cars would get across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska, a distance of 47 miles across an expanse of water often filled with ice flows and buffeted by powerful winds. But others have proposed a variety of solutions, including a bridge supported by 200 piers made from a special type of concrete that could withstand the incredible pressures generated by the ice.

An underwater tunnel is another possibility, but constructing beneath the hard, uneven sea floor of the strait would be one of the most difficult public works projects in history. Massive machines would be employed to drill deep into the rock, and the tunnel would have to be sufficiently reinforced to withstand a 7.9 magnitude earthquake in the seismically volatile region.

Click to learn more

#innovations #civil engineering

teded

Who run the world?

Check out this lesson on confidence we made in partnership with the Always ‪#‎LikeAGirl‬ campaign: 3 tips to boost your confidence

Animation by Kozmonot Animation Studio

#outreach

gnimlehwrevo-deactivated2020102

Here’s a video just for you guys of me trying out my new bebionic hand! What do you think?!?

#biomedical engineering #mechanical engineering #electrical engineering

skunkbear

Here’s the orbital period of our solar system’s 8 major planets (how long it takes each to travel around the sun). Their size is to scale and their speed is accurate relative to Earth’s. The repetition of each GIF is proportional to their orbital period. Mercury takes less than 3 months to zoom around Sol, Neptune takes nearly 165 years.

#aerospace engineering

authentic-boredom

Bike and Begum Ayaskan have sent us photos of GROWTH, an origami-based pot plant they have designed, that transforms and grows with the plant over time.

#innovations #materials engineering #mechanical engineering

micdotcom

If you couldn’t tell already, NASA is having a great year. From Pluto to food grown in space, even in the face of budget cuts, the nation’s space agency had some stellar highlights. Most mysteriously of all, a spacecraft found two eerily bright lights on a distant dwarf planet.

#aerospace engineering

fer1972

kushandwizdom

Nature and noise

#sound engineering #acoustics #art #mechanical engineering

chicagoarchitecturebiennial

Rebel Architecture: Pakistan’s First Female Architect Yasmeen Lari Uses Design to Tackle Real Issues

Yasmeen Lari, Pakistan’s first female architect, started out designing huge buildings like the Pakistan State Oil Building (seen in the background of the interview above). But when aid failed to materialize after the devastating 2010 floods, she turned to traditional techniques to design flood and earthquake proof buildings for people in remote regions. Yasmeen Lari is one of the most successful providers of disaster relief shelters in the world, having built over 36,000 houses for those hit by floods and earthquakes in Pakistan since 2010. Shunning the weak, mass-produced houses offered by international organisations, she uses vernacular techniques and local materials like lime and bamboo, with a tiny carbon footprint and simple enough for people to build themselves. With this she hopes to demonstrate the role that architecture can play in humanitarian aid. Lari was fittingly one of the subjects of Al Jazeera’s “Rebel Architecture” series, which uncovered key architects shunning the glamour of “starchitecture” and using design to tackle the world’s urban, environmental and social crises. She is also participating alongside over 100 other architects, artists, and designers in the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial this October.

#women in stem #civil engineering #architectural engineering

whats-out-there

I was an ordinary person who studied hard.

Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, d. 1988 (via whats-out-there)

••••••

Context:

“You ask me if an ordinary person could ever get to be able to imagine these things like I imagine them. Of course! I was an ordinary person who studied hard. There are no miracle people. It happens they get interested in this thing and they learn all this stuff, but they’re just people. There’s no talent, no special ability to understand quantum mechanics, or to imagine electromagnetic fields, that comes without practice and reading and learning and study. I was not born understanding quantum mechanics – I still don’t understand quantum mechanics! I was born not knowing things were made out of atoms, and not being able to visualize, therefore, when I saw the bottle of milk that I was sucking, that it was a dynamic bunch of balls bouncing around. I had to learn that just like anybody else. So if you take an ordinary person who is willing to devote a great deal of time and work and thinking and mathematics, then he’s become a scientist!”

#stem

stufftoblowyourmind-deactivated

Anatomical art generally generally depicts recognizable, perfectly formed parts or figures, flayed open to display all the beauty and genius of our design. It’s medical, certainly, but it’s usually a testament to the beauty of the human body. Photographer Adam Voorhes goes in an entirely different direction in the book Malformed: Forgotten Brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital. How he came across his evocative subjects is a surreal story. From the book’s description: Hidden away out of sight in a forgotten storage closet deep within the bowels of the University of Texas State Mental Hospital languished a forgotten, but unique and exceptional, collection of hundreds of extremely rare, malformed, or damaged human brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde. Decades later, in 2013, photographer Adam Voorhes discovered the brains and became obsessed with documenting them in close-up, high-resolution, large format photographs, revealing their oddities, textures, and otherworldly essence. Voorhes donned a respirator and chemical gloves, and began the painstaking process of photographing the collection. Not only had decades worth of rare brains just been tossed aside, Voorhes learned that their abandonment followed a “Battle for the Brains,” where even Harvard attempted to get ahold of the collection....

“Hidden away out of sight in a forgotten storage closet deep within the bowels of the University of Texas State Mental Hospital languished a forgotten, but unique and exceptional, collection of hundreds of extremely rare, malformed, or damaged human brains preserved in jars of formaldehyde.”

#utexas #biomedical engineering #chemical engineering