Engineering in the News February 2010

Excerpts from Illinois in the News, a daily service provided by the University of Illinois News Bureau. This collection of February excerpts focuses on engineering topics and faculty contacted for their expertise by print and broadcast reporters around the world.

PRINTABLE CIRCUITS
R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., Feb. 28) -- John Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the U. of I., has pioneered techniques for printable electrical circuits.

ENGINEERS VS. SCIENTISTS
USA Today (Feb. 28) -- Article about alumnus' Henry Petroski (PhD 1968, TAM), author of The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems, a cry from the heart for a little respect for the engineering professions. "Engineers 'don't get no respect,' sometimes," Petroski says, particularly as society looks to solve problems like creating clean and renewable energy, climate and many other challenges ahead. Instead, he argues, science gets the prestige and attention that engineering deserves.

NANOTECHNOLOGY
Nanowerk News (Honolulu, Feb. 25) -- Scientists at the U. of I. and at the Naval Research Laboratory have reported a new technique for directly writing composites of nanoparticles and polymers. “Our ability to control nanometer-scale heat sources allows local thermal processing of these nanocomposites,” says William King, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois. Also: AZoNano (Sydney, Feb. 25), PhysOrg (Douglas, Isle of Man, Feb. 24), e! Science News (Quebec City, Feb. 25), Nanotechnology Now (Banks, Ore., Feb. 25), RedOrbit (Dallas, Feb. 26), Science Daily (Chevy Chase, Md., Feb. 25).

U of I PARTNERS IN CENTER TO CREATE BIOLOGICAL MACHINES
Popular Science (Feb 24)  -- The new $25-million Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems Center, part of the National Science Foundation’s Science and Technology Centers Integrative Partnerships program, will be operated by the U. of I., MIT and Georgia Tech. The center “offers the opportunity to create a truly innovative, transformative approach to interdisciplinary graduate and undergraduate education,” said center education coordinator K. Jimmy Hsia, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at Illinois. Also: PhysOrg.com (Douglas, Isle of Man, Feb. 23), EurekAlert (Feb. 23), The May Report (Feb. 23), FirstScience (Feb. 23), MIT News (Feb. 23), Daily Illini (Feb. 23), Softpedia (Feb.23), Medical News Today (Bexhill-on-Sea, England, Feb. 24), Scientific Computing (Rockaway, N.J., Feb. 24), Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (New Rochelle, N.Y., Feb. 24).

U of I PART OF NSF INFORMATION RESEARCH CENTER
Brown County Democrat (from The Associated Press; Columbus, Ind., Feb. 24) -- The U. of I. is a partner with Purdue University in a National Science Foundation-funded center for the joint study of how information is extracted, manipulated and exchanged. Related article: The Indianapolis Star (Feb. 24).

RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE
Inside Higher Ed (Feb. 24) -- Thom Dunning, director of the U. of I.’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications, was one of the academic administrators who recently testified during a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing on the state of research infrastructure at American institutions.

RECRUITING ILLINOIS COMPUTER SCIENCE GRADS
CIO (Framingham, Mass., Feb. 22) -- Computer science graduates from the U. of I. are being recruited by software, healthcare, trading and agricultural companies. Also: NetworkWorld (Feb 22).

ALGORITHMS & MUSIC
Miller-McCune (Santa Barbara, Calif., Feb. 22) -- Algorithmic composers use a list of instructions — as opposed to sheer inspiration — to create their works. During the 18th century, Joseph Haydn and others created scores for a musical dice game called Musikalisches Würfelspiel, in which players rolled dice to determine which of 272 measures of music would be played in a certain order. More recently, 1950s-era U. of I. researchers Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson programmed stylistic parameters into the Illiac computer to create the Illiac Suite, and Greek composer Iannis Xenakis used probability equations.

ALUMNUS DEBUTS REVOLUTIONARY FUEL CELL
“60 Minutes” (CBS News, Feb. 21) -- A “60 Minutes” segment, broadcast Sunday, Feb. 21, featured a new power source that some believe may one day replace big power plants and transmission line grid.  The developer of the device and founder of Bloom Energy, K.R. Sridhar, earned his doctorate in mechanical engineering from the U. of I. Also: New York Times (Feb. 23), The Economic Times (New Delhi, Feb. 23).

PHYSICS
Physics World (Bristol, England, Feb.18) -- U. of I. physics professor Benjamin Lev and colleagues at Illinois have for the first time trapped ultracold atoms of dysprosium, the most magnetic element in the periodic table. The breakthrough could open the door to a greater understanding of superfluidity, highly sensitive probes of magnetic fields, and new ways to read and encode quantum information.

FLEXIBLE MATERIALS
Smart Planet (New York City, Feb. 17) -- Scientists at the U. of I. are working on flexible, inorganic solar panels that are flexible enough to be rolled around a pencil and transparent enough to be used to tint windows on buildings or cars.

MATERIAL COMMENTS
Reuters (Feb. 14) -- John Rogers, a U. of I. professor of materials science and engineering who is working on ways to make inorganic materials more flexible, says while many companies are investing in organic solar cells – basically materials like plastic that contain carbon – these materials have relatively low performance, less long-term reliability and an unproven cost structure. Also: CNET News (from Reuters; San Francisco, Feb. 14), News24 (from Reuters; Johannesburg, Feb. 15), Alibaba News Channel (from Reuters; Hong Kong, Feb. 20).

NANOPARTICLES CLEAN DRINKING WATER
Cosmos magazine (Sydney, Feb. 15) -- Scientists from the U. of I. and the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science in China have developed nanotechnology that purifies water using only visible light.

ENGINEERING ALUMNUS TO BUY RAMS
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Feb. 11) -- Shahid Khan, (BS 1971, Industrial Engineering) has agreed to purchase majority ownership of the St. Louis Rams. Khan is president of Flex-N-Gate Corp., an auto-parts manufacturer based in Urbana, Ill. Also: Chicago Tribune (Feb. 11). Story was covered nationwide in several hundred print and broadcast media.

FISHY SENSORS
GizMag (St. Kilda South, Australia, Feb. 11) -- Douglas Jones, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois, along with Chang Liu from Northwestern University, have developed a sensing device based on fish anatomy that could someday be used to keep man-made submersibles out of harm’s way.

PARALLEL COMPUTING
EE Times (Manhasset, N.Y., Feb. 11) -- Parallel computing labs at the U. of I. and at the University of California at Berkeley were launched with grants from Intel and Microsoft to find programming models to harness CPUs packing dozens of cores.

SCIENCE AS ART
Ivanhoe Broadcast News (Winter Park, Fla., Feb. 10) -- Adam Steele, an aerospace engineering graduate student at Illinois., sees art when he looks through a microscope, an ability that earned him second place in the materials research society’s “science as art” competition.

RESEARCH PARK
Forbes (from The Associated Press, Feb. 10) -- Sony Corp. has purchased a medical technology company based at the U. of I. Research Park.

COMPUTING COMPARISON
CNET News (San Francisco, Feb. 9) -- By the time Intel had introduced its latest processor for servers, the Itanium 9300, on Monday, IBM had already stolen Intel’s thunder with its new Power7 chip technology, announced earlier in the morning. Power7 is being used to construct what may be the fastest supercomputer in the world at Illinois. The Blue Waters project supercomputer will theoretically be capable of achieving up to 10 petaflops, about 10 times as fast as the fastest supercomputer today.

CELL PHONES & DRIVING
R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., Feb. 9) -- A new study analyzing the impact of hand-held cell-phone legislation on driving safety concludes that usage-ban laws had more of an impact in densely populated urban areas with a higher number of licensed drivers than in rural areas where there are fewer licensed drivers, according to a U. of I. researcher. The study, conducted by Sheldon H. Jacobson, a professor of computer science and the director of the simulation and optimization laboratory at Illinois, analyzed the relationship between pre- and post-law automobile accident rates using public data from 62 counties in New York. Also: Daily India (from Asian News International, New Delhi; Jacksonville, Fla., Feb. 10), Science Daily (Chevy Chase, Md., Feb. 10), Thaindian News (from Asian News International, New Delhi; Bangkok, Feb. 10), Medical News Today (Bexhill-on-Sea, England, Feb. 11), The Boston Globe (Feb. 17), Omineca Express (Vanderhoof, British Columbia, Feb. 23).

MOST CITED RESEARCH
ScienceWatch.com (from Thomson Reuters; Philadelphia, Feb. 10) -- Engineering at Illinois is #1 on "The Most-Cited Institutions in Engineering, 1999-2009" list of institutions with the highest total citations to their research papers published in Thomson Reuters-indexed engineering journals for the 10-year period.

KSDK-TV5 (St. Louis, Feb. 6) -- Hundreds of experts are meeting in St. Louis about earthquake preparedness. The meeting was set up long ago, to coincide with the anniversary of the big quake in New Madrid Missouri on February 7, 1812. Experts were looking at a new study about the impact of earthquakes prepared by the Mid-America Earthquake Center, paid for by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

PHYSICS AND COMPUTING
Scientific American (Feb. 4) -- A team of physicists from the U. of I. has assembled a supercomputer to help them build a simulation depicting how chromatophore proteins turn light energy into chemical energy in photosynthesis.

SUPERCOMPUTER TIME
HPC Wire (San Diego, Feb. 3) -- U. of I. computer science professor William Gropp is among the researchers awarded supercomputing processor time by the U.S. Department of Energy as part of its 2010 Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment program.

TONY LEGGETT
Times of India (Mumbai, Feb. 3) -- U. of I. physics professor Anthony J. Leggett, a Nobel Prize winner in 2003, is participating in the International Center for Theoretical Sciences program at IIT in Kanpur, India.

COMPUTATIONAL MATERIALS ENGINEERING
Reliable Plant Magazine (Tulsa, Okla., Feb. 3) -- U. of I. researchers are among the experts from universities around the world collaborating in Ford Motor Company’s Integrated Computational Materials Team, a group that determines how materials will alter during the manufacturing process by analyzing the properties and performing computer simulations that eliminate the need for physical tests.

"ROBO-BALL" VIDEO FEATURED
PopularScience.com -- a pair of graduate students in aerospace engineering have developed a pneumatic ball-levitating system that can guide "floating" balls through an obstacle course of hoops, making asymmetrical objects like apples and water bottles float as carefree as perfect spheres, or launching balls across a room with precision accuracy.

PROFESSOR TRACKS DIPLOMA MILLS
LaCrosse Tribune (from The Associated Press; Wisconsin, Feb. 2) -- Wisconsin lawmakers are considering a bill that would crack down on the manufacture and use of phony academic credentials in Wisconsin by criminalizing both practices. Wisconsin would become the 12th state to make it a crime to use a bogus academic degree, said George Gollin, a U. of I. physics professor who is an expert on the issue. Also: BusinessWeek (from AP, Feb. 2), Capital Times (from AP; Madison, Wis., Feb. 2), Wausau Daily Herald (from AP; Wisconsin, Feb. 3).

EWB STUDENTS DESIGN CLEAN-WATER SYSTEM
The Journal Gazette Times-Courier (Feb. 1, Meeker) -- An Engineers Without Borders group from the University of Illinois, which "helped plan a gravity-flow water system for the village of Ntisaw in Cameroon." The article describes the group's experiences working in Africa, such as designing the water system by "lamps and calculators and graph paper" because of the lack of electricity, as well as "cultural contrasts and parallels" observed in daily life there.
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Contact: Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.