News from Engineering at Illinois April 2013

This monthly summary includes excerpts from Illinois in the News, a daily service provided by the University of Illinois News Bureau and other media search tools. This collection of April stories focuses on engineering topics and faculty contacted for their expertise by print and broadcast reporters around the world.

TRANSPORTATION SUSTAINABILITY PARTNERSHIP
News-Gazette (April 30) -- The University of Illinois is set to begin research over the next three years to make the state's transportation system more environmentally friendly. Illinois Department of Transportation Secretary Ann L. Schneider announced Tuesday that the department is spending $2.6 million over three years beginning in fiscal year 2014 to improve the state transportation system's sustainability.

HISTORY OF THE INTERNET
Columbia Journalism Review (April 30) -- On April 30 1993, CERN, the international particle physics laboratory that developed the World Wide Web, put its "W3" software in the public domain - putting the Web on course to define the modern Internet. The same year that CERN made its code public, the U. of I. released the first version of the Mosaic browser — a reliable and easy-to-use browser for “non-geeks.” These tools helped set the conditions for the spread of the Web.

DRONES IN THE CLASSROOM
News-Gazette (April 30) -- Four University of Illinois seniors, and members of a student organization called Moon Goons, were at Stratton Leadership and Microsociety Magnet School on Monday and Tuesday to talk to students about drones and experiments they plan to do with them in a zero-gravity environment.

PHYSICS OF BASEBALL
WOUB (NPR; Athens, Ohio, April 29) -- U. of I. professor emeritus Alan Nathan discusses the physics of baseball as the guest on an Ohio University radio talk show. (Full program is available through this link.)

WIRELESS SIMULATIONS
AZoBuild (Warriewood, Australia, April 29) A professor of computer science and engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis has teamed with Gul Agha, PhD, professor of computer science, and Bill Spencer, PhD, professor of civil engineering at Illinois, and colleagues at Purdue University, to develop a unique system they call a Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator, a state-of-the-art, integrated environment that combines realistic simulations of both wireless sensor networks and structures.

PRINTING 3D PROTOTYPES
Knoxvillebiz.com (April 28) -- Unlike previous generations of 3-D printers, milling machines and laser cutters, many of today’s models fit on a desktop and are designed for micromanufacturing. "There’s something about being able to hold and physically interact with a design that feels more real and allows you to get feedback more directly than looking at a 3-D image on a screen,” said Eduardo Torrealba, co-founder and CEO of Oso Technologies, a company started by engineering graduate students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Oso makes sensors that measure soil moisture content and send alerts to a computer or mobile phone when plants need to be watered.

INTERNET HISTORY
The Register (London, April 26) -- NCSA's Mosiac, the first widely used web browser, marks its 20th anniversary this week.

NUCLEAR POWER
Design News (Lexington, Mass., April 26) -- The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant performed beyond its best expectations after being struck by a mammoth earthquake and a 40-ft-high tidal wave in 2011, experts said last week. “In this case, the public got hardly any dose at all,” says James F. Stubbins, a professor of nuclear, plasma and radiological engineering at Illinois.

ELECTRIAL STORMS FROM SPACE
Red Orbit.com (Dallas, April  26) -- U. of I. electrical engineering professor Erhan Kudeki is working with NASA to help scientists better understand and predict electrical storms in Earth’s upper atmosphere. His experiment goes into action next week with the launch of two rockets from a Pacific atoll. Also: Space Daily (April 29).

BIOFUELS
The Christian Science Monitor (April 26) -- "As we continue to use liquid fuels, they are going to be have to be transported," said Clifford Singer, a co-director of the U. of I.'s initiative in Energy and Sustainability Engineering. Even a switch to cleaner biofuels carries consequences. Because current pipelines do not support ethanol, it is transported along the nation's roads and highways. "It requires a lot of truck traffic and that constitutes a hazard," Singer said, "but people probably don't even notice that they’re connected to energy."  

DISSOLVABLE ELECTRONICS
Gizmodo (Sydney, April 26) -- The unique properties of silk are opening new technological horizons. Researchers at the U. of I., for example, have been using silk to develop a new breed of meltable electronics.

BIOLOGICAL ENGINEERING
Chemical & Engineering News (Washington, D.C., April 25) -- People with chronic diseases such as diabetes and multiple sclerosis have inflamed, leaky blood vessels, heightening their risk of heart attack and stroke. Some scientists envision using a patient’s own stem cells to regrow healthy tissue to plug the leaks and calm inflammation. A polymer coating developed by U. of I. chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Hyun Joon Kong could help those cells find their biological targets.

SAFER BATTERIES
Motor Trend (Detroit, April 24) -- Lithium-ion batteries offer the promise of more power in a lighter package, but, as seen with recent problems in Boeing’s new 787’s, they also tend to be more susceptible to fire. A team of U. of I. researchers is looking to a nano-technological cure for this problem – deploying a thin coating of nanospheres to serve as a sub-microscopic fire brigade. Also: ASEE FirstBell (April 26).

ANTIMICROBIAL COATING
R & D Magazine (April 24) -- A research team at the A*STAR Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore--affiliated with the College of Engineering at Illnois--has now developed a highly effective antimicrobial coating based on polymers. The coating can be applied to medical equipment, such as catheters, explains Yi-Yan Yang, who led the research.

BIOMOLECULAR IDENTIFICATION
Laboratory Talk (Berkhamsted, England, April 24) -- U. of I. researchers led by chemical and biomolecular engineering professor Charles Schroeder have developed a new class of fluorescing probes that will allow scientists to better directly observe biological processes at the molecular level.

NANOWIRE SURPRISE
R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., April 23) -- U. of I engineers who set out to grow nanowires of a compound semiconductor on top of a sheet of graphene found a surprise when they looked at the resulting structure. According to ECE professor Xiuling Li, who led the study, the InGaAs wires grown on graphene spontaneously segregate into an indium arsenide (InAs) core with an InGaAs shell around the outside of the wire. Also: IEEE Spectrum (April 23), Science Daily (April 23), ScienceBlog (April 23), Science World Report (New York City, April 23), AZoNano (Warriewood, Australia, April 25).

MEASURING MICROPARTICLES
Solid State Technology (Tulsa, Okla., April 22) -- U. of I. researchers, led by MechSE professor William P. King, have developed a technique to measure nanometer-scale behavior of semiconductor microparticles. This will give scientists new tools to better understand how devices perform and to confirm theoretical models. Also: Science Daily (April 22), ScienceBlog (April 22), Solid State Technology (April 22).

MANUFACTURING
Scientific American (April 22) -- U. of I. graduate student S. Brett Walker’s invention of a technique that can print electronic circuits on surfaces such as cellophane and paper is predicted to be one that will change the future of manufacturing. Also: International Business Times (New York City, April 23).

MATERIALS ENTREPRENEUR
Crain’s Chicago Business (April 22) -- John Rogers is teaching silicon semiconductors to become as supple as skin. The professor of materials science and engineering at Illinois foresees sensors that could be worn as comfortably as a cap or a Band-Aid. His initial product could be on the market by the end of the year.

FLOODING
Chicago Tribune (April 18) -- River flooding north of the Chicago area means the potential for a second crest on local rivers in coming days, says Marcelo Garcia, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Illinois. Continued rain could lead to a “really critical situation,” he said, adding that multiple days without rain would be required before water levels would drop to more normal levels. That’s not in the forecast. “The ground is saturated. Everything is saturated,” he said. “I think it’s going to be a test to see how resilient the city and suburbs are.”

MICROBATTERIES OFFER BIG POWER
Science Daily (April 16) -- Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by William King, have developed new microbatteries that can out-power even the best supercapacitors and could drive new applications in radio communications and compact electronics. The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Also:e! Science News (Quebec City, April 16), OpEdNews.com (April 16), ScienceBlog (April 16), Engadget (April 17), Zee News (India, April 17), Daily News and Analysis (India, April 17), The Times of India (Mumbai, April 17), Clean Technica (Las Vegas, April 17), ExtremeTech (New York City, April 17), PhysOrg.com (Douglas, Isle of Man, April 16), Yahoo News (April 17), Venture Beat (April 17), Techi (April 17), BBC News (April 17), BGR (April 17), Science World Report (April 17), The Green Optimistic (blog, April 17), Yahoo News Canada (blog, April 17), Mashable.com (April 17), R&D Magazine (Rockaway, N.J., April 17), TweakTown (Taipei, Taiwan, April 17), Daily KOS (April 17), Med City News (April 17), CrazyEngineers (April 17), UPI.com (April 17), Experts Exchange (blog, April 17), Overclockers Club (blog, April 18), CNet Austrailia (April 18), GMA News Online (April 18), HEXAS (April 18), AzoNano (April 18), International Business Times (New York City, April 18), Crain's Morning 10 (April 18), ASEE FirstBell (April 18 & April 19), Neowin.net (April 18), The Register (UK, April 18), TechWeek Europe UK (April 18), TechCrunch (April 18), Gizmondo UK (April 18), Gadget Review (April 18), ReadWrite (April 18), CNet News (San Francisco, April 18), EV World (April 18), Science 360 (NSF, Washington, DC, April 18), Daily Mail (London, April 21; third article in the news roundup), The New Zealand Herald (Auckland, April 22; third article in the news roundup), Brantford Expositor (Brantford, Ontario, Canada, April 27), Trusted Reviews (London, April 29), plus a number of foreign language media sites.

MATERIALS
Solid State Technology (Tulsa, Okla., April 17) -- Highly strained ferroelectric lead zirconate titanate films with good electrical properties have been fabricated by a U of I researcher team led by Lane Martin. Also: Photonics.com (Pittsfield, Mass., April 25).

VIDEOCONFERENCING
Chicago Sun-Times (April 16) -- U. of I. electrical and computer engineering professor Sanjay Patel is the CEO of Personify, a 4-year-old company that sells software to put the speaker center stage in a videoconference at minimal cost and with cutting-edge gesturing technology. Editor’s note: The article is not online; it appears on Page 13 of the four-star print edition.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENT CHOICES
Economic Times (India, April 15) -- RishabhJain, 17, has written his CBSE XII boards this year. A student of science stream at DPS, RKPuram in Delhi, Jain has already made it to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Purdue University, and Rutgers University, in the US. Jain has accepted the electrical engineering course at the University of Illinois.

CONCRETE CANOE
Tyler Morning Telegraph (April 15) -- The University of Texas at Tyler's chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers placed first out of 14 teams in the society's Texas-Mexico Regional Concrete Canoe Competition recently held in Corpus Christi. The team will advance to nationals this summer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

CONVERTING WASTE TO CRUDE
Biodiesel Magazine (April 15) -- Yuanhui Zhang and Lance Schideman, both professors in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have combined their research efforts to develop an innovative system that uses swine manure to produce biocrude oil, grow algal biomass, capture carbon, purify wastewater and recycle nutrients. Also: Domestic Fuel (Los Angeles, April 17).

ELECTRONIC INK ENTREPRENEUR
News-Gazette (April 14) -- Brett Walker seemingly can't stop creating stuff. The 27-year-old doctoral student at the University of Illinois started a gun-parts business in high school. He turned his attention to fuels in college, converting waste grease into biodiesel and "slop oil" into pipeline-grade oil. Now, completing his doctoral degree, he's launching a business around reactive silver inks — used in printed electronics. The reactive silver ink is superior in several respects to colloidal inks conventionally used for printed electronics, Walker said. Also: ASEE FirstBell (April 16).

INJECTABLE LED SENSORS
Wired (San Francisco, April 11) -- Tiny, glowing probes packed with LEDs and sensors are scientists’ newest tool for measuring and manipulating the brain and other living tissues. They’re flexible, they can operate wirelessly, and yes, they’re small enough to fit through the eye of a needle, says John A. Rogers, a materials scientist at Illinois and co-leader of the team that developed the probes. Also: MedicalXpress.com (April 11), Science Codex (April 11), ScienceBlog (April 11), Discovery News (April 11), Technology Review (April 11), Washington University News (April 11), R & D Magazine (April 11), ScienceDaily (April 11), ASEE FirstBell (April 12), AZoNano (Warriewood, New South Wales, April 12), Laser Focus World (Nashua, N.H., April 12), Scientific Computing (April 11), Gizmodo-Austrailia (April 13), Mashable (April 12), IEEE Spectrum (April), ExtremeTech (April 15), News-Medical.net (Sydney, April 15), The Engineer (April 15), Photonics.com (Pittsfield, Mass., April 15), New Electronics (London, April 17), Medical Technology Business Europe (Farnborough, England, April 23) .

Related story: io9 (New York City, April 15) -- New research by materials scientist John A. Rogers at the U. of I. and a colleague at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that optogenetics could be used to stimulate the brain’s reward and pleasure pathways – all without unwieldy wires or cables stuck into the brain.

SUPERCONDUCTING TI QUALITIES DEMONSTRATED
Phys.org (April 10)-- An interdisciplinary research team at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory, has measured superconductive surface states in TIs where the bulk charge carriers were successfully depleted. The experiments were conducted in the laboratory of Illinois condensed matter physicist Nadya Mason , were carried out by postdoctoral research associate Sungjae Cho. Also: ScienceBlog (April 10).

CRUSHING CONCRETE
York Daily Record (Pennsylvania, April 10) -- A concrete crushing event was part of the Engineering Open House day at the U. of I. last month. Check out a video capturing a mechanical press capable of applying 3 million pounds of force squeezing an 800-pound concrete pillar until it breaks apart.

IMAGING
Chicago Tribune (April 10) -- “Just as the telecoms industry has devised ways to squeeze more information content through optical fibers, a team have done the same for medical endoscopy,” says Stephen Boppart, an engineering professor at the U. of I.

TEXT MESSAGES
ABC News (New York City, April 9) -- A text message – especially one accompanied by an audible alert like a buzz or bell – interrupts a person’s thoughts and can be hard to ignore, says Christopher Wickens, a U. of I. professor emeritus of engineering and aviation psychology. Also: KOMO-Channel 4 (Seattle, April 9), The Associated Press (April 9), The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Wash., April 10).

TRANSIENT ELECTRONICS
Red Orbit com (Dallas, April 8) -- “The goal of the electronics industry has always been to build durable devices that last forever with stable performance,” says John A. Rogers, a materials science and engineering professor at Illinois. “But many new opportunities open up once you start thinking about electronics that could disappear in a controlled and programmable way.” Also: The Verge (New York City, April 8), Electronics News (Sydney, April 10), Complex.com (New York City, April 9), Geekosystem (April 8), Discovery News (April 11), Tech Arena (Italy, April 10), Nanowerk, LLC (April 8), U.S. News & World Report (April 11).

PHYSICS
New Scientist (Cambridge, England, April 6) -- Matter and antimatter have been caught coexisting – again. U. of I. physics professor Dale Van Harlingen and his team duplicated the results of an experiment last year that seem to confirm the existence of a  type of subatomic particle that is both positive and negative, would have a zero charge and could co-exist without annihilating each other.

AIR SAFETY
Airport World (Twickenham, England, April 8) -- The U. of I. is among the people and institutions trying to develop avian radar systems that can help airports avert bird-aircraft incidents. Edwin Herricks, an emeritus professor of civil engineering at Illinois, says the U. of I. has been testing systems for the past six years.

BASEBALL WARM-UP
KOMO-Channel 4 (ABC; Seattle, April 8) -- A Seattle meteorologist says the Seattle Mariners stadium renovations that moved fences closer this season will make it feel warmer – at least for home run hitters. He’s basing his predictions on U. of I. emeritus physics professor Alan Nathan’s study of how temperature affects the flight of a baseball.

UI LABS
Crain’s Chicago Business (April 5) -- UI Labs, the effort to bring together the research power of the U. of I. and Chicago’s business community, has taken the first formal steps to becoming a reality.

FLYING
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (Frederick, Md., April 4) -- Future pilots might be invited to have a tiny sensor surgically implanted in their brain, extending the fly-by-wire concept straight to the motor cortex. A more palatable option, perhaps, is simply donning a headset, though accuracy suffers. Timothy Bretl, a professor of aerospace engineering at the U. of I., says it is “unlikely” that systems based on EEGs and similar devices “will give performance that exceeds traditional input devices in an aircraft.

STUDENT SURVIVOR CREATES MIRACLES
Daily Herald (April 4) -- Several years after recovering from a devastating head injury, Matt Schuelke, a senior in bioengineering at Illinois, assists with cutting-edge imaging research aimed at benefiting diabetic patients.

SHAHID KHAN
The New York Times (April 2) --  “I got a great education,” graduating from the U. of I., says Shahid Khan, who will be this year’s commencement speaker at Illinois. “If you’re going to work,” he says, “you can be anything you want to be.”

EVOLUTION
Discovery (April 1) -- “Our perspective is that life emerged from a collective state, and so it is not at all obvious that there is one single organism which was ancestral,” says Nigel Goldenfeld, a U. of I. physics professor.

BLUE WATERS OPEN FOR RESEARCH
Scientific Computing (Rockaway, N.J., April 1) --  The NSF-funded Blue Waters, one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, was formally declared available for use at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The opening ceremony was attended by corporate, government and university leaders. Also: Data Center Knowledge (Lawrenceville, N.J., April 2).

Related story: HPC Wire (San Diego, April 24) -- Blue Waters, the U. of I. supercomputer that officially began operations in March is already being put to work by researchers trying to get a better handle on global precipitation.

GAS MILEAGE
Chicago Business Journal (April 1) -- A team of U. of I. students has designed a car that gets 100 miles per gallon. Also: WILL Radio.TV online (April 1), The HawkEye (April 1), i4u.com (April 1), News Radio WJPF (from The Associated Press, April 1), Enquirer-Herald (from AP, April 1), WAND-TV (April 1), WBEZ.FM (April 1), ASEE FirstBell (April 5).

MARCH GLADNESS
Chicago Tribune (April 1) -- The U. of I. may have been edged out by Miami in men’s basketball, but it has clinched a berth at another Final Four – in intercollegiate chess. The Illini Chess Club, originally a 14 seed, will be the Cinderella team at the President’s Cup in Herndon, Va., this week. Eric Rosen, a freshman in computer science and math, is part of the team. Also: DNAinfo.com (Chicago, April 2).

Related article: Chicago Sun-Times (April 5) -- A Q&A with U. of I. sophomore Michael Auger, who’s a member of the university’s chess team, which is competing this weekend in the national collegiate chess championships in Rockville, Md. Editor’s note: The article is not yet available online.

Related article: St. Louis Post-Dispatch (April 7) -- Webster University won the national collegiate chess championship this weekend. The U. of I. team was among the final four competing.
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If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/244-7716.