Engineering in the News June 2010

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

ILLINI PULLERS FEATURED
WCIA-TV (Champaign, Ill.; June 28) -- Members of the championship tractor team talked about their successful project, trophies and sponsors.

BUBBLE PROPERTIES
R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., June 28) -- Researchers have observed imploding bubble conditions so hot that the gas inside the bubbles ionizes into plasma, but quantifying the temperature and pressure properties has been elusive. In a paper published in Nature Physics, U. of I. chemistry professor Kenneth S. Suslick and former student David Flannigan, now at the California Institute of Technology, experimentally determine the plasma electron density, temperature and extent of ionization.

AVIATION
Flight Global (Sutton, England, June 29) -- Engineers at the U. of I. and University of Connecticut have developed an adaptive flight-control algorithm that could give the pilot of an otherwise uncontrollable aircraft just a few extra seconds of controllability, enough to give him or her time to save the vehicle from a loss-of-control accident.

EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS
Chicago Tribune (from The Associated Press, June 25) -- U. of I. research indicates a major earthquake on the New Madrid fault would kill 3,500 people and leave millions homeless. Amr Elnashai, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Illinois, says he found that authorities in Illinois and seven other states also aren’t prepared to repair and retrofit the numerous bridges likely to be damaged. Also: Memphis Daily News (from The Associated Press; Tennessee, June 25), St. Louis Post-Dispatch (from The Associated Press, June 25), WREG-Channel 3 (CBS; Memphis, Tenn., June 28).

QUANTUM THEORY
New Scientist (London, June 28) -- Nobel laureate Anthony Leggett, a professor of physics at Illinois, thinks there are too many issues with quantum theory to think it anything more than an approximation of reality.

SMOKESTACK-EMISSION EXPERT
Environmental Protection (Dallas, June 28) -- Mark J. Rood, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Illinois., was a member of the ASTM International Committee D22 on Air Quality that approved a new method for measuring emissions from smokestacks.

PHYSICS OF BASEBALL
The Wall Street Journal (June 25) – U. of I. physicist and baseball sabermetrician Alan Nathan thinks speed is less consequential to New York Met’s R.A. Dickey's 6-0 start. Rather, it's the vagaries in the way his pitch moves. "His knuckleball clearly breaks in a random direction," Nathan said. "As long as it doesn't hang, the batter can only guess which way."

PLANETARY SCIENCE
R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., June 24) -- Using quantum simulations, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U. of I. and the Univ. of LAquia in Italy were able to uncover the phase transitions of the element hydrogen in the laboratory similar to how they would occur in the centers of giant planets.
Also: AZoNano (Sydney, Australia, June 24), Science Centric (Sofia, Bulgaria, June 24), Science Daily (Chevy Chase, Md., June 23).

SOLAR POWER
Cypress Mail (Nicosia, June 24) -- The U. of I. collaborated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Cyprus Institute in a combined solar power and desalination plant to be constructed in Cyprus.

ILLINOIS-MAYO RESEARCH ALLIANCE
Bradenton Herald (Florida, June 22) -- Mayo Clinic and the U. of I. are announcing a strategic alliance that provides a framework for broad cooperation in individualized medicine by integrating efforts in basic, translational and clinical research; bioengineering, especially for point-of-care diagnostics; and development of tools and methods in computational biology and medicine. Also: Nanowerk News (Honolulu, June 22), AZoNano (Sydney, Australia, June 23), Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (New Rochelle, N.Y., June 22), News-Medical (Sydney, Australia, June 23), Star Tribune (Minneapolis, Minn., June 22), Bradenton Herald (Florida, June 24).

USING BLOG POSTS TO PREDICT STOCK MARKET BEHAVIOR
New Scientist (June 21) -- Blog posts can be used to predict stock market behavior, according to U. of I. student Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios, a professor of computer science at Illinois.

IMPROVING COMPUTING SPEED
InfoWorld (San Francisco, June 21) -- U. of I. electrical and computer engineering professor Rakesh Kumar has proposed a novel way to improve the speed of current CPUs: Cut the brakes. Today's chips, he says, spend too much time trying to get every calculation exactly right. Also: PC World (from InfoWorld, San Francisco; North Sydney, Australia, June 22).

BP EXEC IS ILLINOIS ALUMNUS
Christian Science Monitor (June 18) -- Bob Dudley, the BP executive who now will have day-to-day responsibility for managing the companys oil spill response in the Gulf of Mexico, has a degree in chemical engineering from the U. of I.

COMPUTER CHIPS
The Australian (Sydney, June 15) -- Engineers are facing a choice: waiting for new chips from Intel, which will be based on technology it popularized in PCs and standard servers; or use existing graphics chips from Nvidia or AMD that have more cores but require a redesign of software applications that will cost engineers time. “If people are willing to take the time to rewrite the applications, we’ve seen some pretty spectacular performance,” said Thom Dunning, Director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the U. of I. “But you don’t get that for free.”

NANOTECHNOLOGY
ARS Technica (June 11)  -- Scientists have made a breakthrough toward creating nanocircuitry on graphene, widely regarded as the most promising candidate to replace silicon as the building block of transistors. “I think there are three things about this study that make it stand out,” said William P. King, a professor in the mechanical science and engineering department at the U. of I. “First, is that the entire process happens in one step. You go from insulating graphene oxide to a functional electronic material by simply applying a nano-heater. Second, we think that any type of graphene will behave this way. Third, the writing is an extremely fast technique. These nanostructures can be synthesized at such a high rate that the approach could be very useful for engineers who want to make nanocircuits.” Also: Nanotechnology Now (June 10), Science Codex (June 10), Before It's News (June 10),  RedOrbit (Dallas, June 11), The X-Journals (June 11), AZoNano (Sydney, June 11), Daily India (from Asian News International, New Delhi; Jacksonville, Fla., June 11), e! Science News (Quebec City, June 10), Physics World (Bristol, England, June 11), R&D Magazine (New Rochelle, N.Y., June 11), Science Centric (Sofia, Bulgaria, June 11), Semiconductor Online (Erie, Pa., June 11), Sindh Today (from ANI, New Delhi; Islamabad, June 11), TopNews India (from ANI New Delhi; Mohali, India, June 11), Science360 (June 14), Science Daily (June 14), Chemistry (Berlin, June 15), Printed Electronics World (Cambridge, England, June 16) Nanowerk News (Honolulu, June 16), R & D Magazine (June 16), bulletins-electroniques.com (in French, June 18), Electronics Weekly (Sutton, England, June 23).

BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
Truth About Trade & Technology (Des Moines, Iowa, June 11) -- Kaustubh Bhalerao, a professor of agricultural and biological engineering at the U. of I., is leading a multidisciplinary research team working to build systems that enable bacteria to communicate with and control plant cells – the basis of how legumes fix nitrogen.

BLUE WATERS
New Scientist (Cambridge, England, June 11) -- At the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Illinois, a supercomputer called Blue Waters is set to come on line in 2011 and will enable scientists to model complex systems such as severe storms, seismic waves and galaxy formation as never before.

BICYCLES
Commercial-News (Danville, Ill., June 10) -- Lose the Training Wheels, a program that uses specially designed bicycles to teach students with varying disabilities how to ride two-wheel bicycles without the aid of training wheels, was developed by Richard Klein, a U. of I. professor of engineering who has retired.

SILICON CHIP ERRORS
eWeek Europe (London, June 8) -- Variations in manufacturing, environment, and workload can conspire to make a silicon chip prone to errors, says electrical and computer engineering professor Rakesh Kumar.

NEW MATERIALS
IT News Online (Mumbai, India, June 8) -- John Rogers, the Lee J. Flory Founder Chair in Engineering Innovation, and a professor of materials science and engineering and of chemistry, and Xiuling Li, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois, have investigated lower-cost techniques to manufacture thin films of gallium arsenide that also granted versatility in the sorts of units they might be integrated into.

BP RESEARCH GRANT
The Sacramento Bee (California, June 6) -- The $500 million BP pledged in 2007 to form the Energy Biosciences Institute was the largest corporate sponsorship ever of university research. The gift – doled out over 10 years to University of California Berkeley, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the U. of I. – created an institute to research plant-based fuels such as ethanol. Also:
Anchorage Daily News (from the Sacramento Bee (California); Alaska, June 6), Lexington Herald-Leader (from the Sacramento Bee (California); Kentucky, June 6), Miami Herald (from the Sacramento Bee (California), June 6), Scripps News (from The Sacramento Bee (California); Washington, D.C., June 9), The Huffington Post  (June 17).

CELEBRATING PLATO'S 50TH ANNIVERSARY
InfoWorld (San Francisco, June 3) -- PLATO, a computer-based teaching system that originated at the U. of I., is credited with generating innovations such as plasma displays and social computing. A conference is under way at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., in recognition of the system’s 50th anniversary. Also: CIO Magazine (from InfoWorld, San Francisco; Framingham, Mass., June 3), TechWorld (from InfoWorld, June 4), PC World (from InfoWorld, June 4).

ABOUT BLUE WATERS
Data Center Knowledge (Lawrenceville, N.J., June 3) -- In a daily video blog from the ISC10 supercomputing conference in Heidelberg, Germany, Thom Dunning, the director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, provides a look at one of the nodes that will power Blue Waters, the powerful supercomputer housed at the new National Petascale Computing Facility at Illinois.
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Contact: Rick Kubetz, Engineering Communications Office, 217/244-7716, editor.