On the side of a medical examining table designed by Architecture Professor Ted Krueger’s vertical studio design class, students installed a small brushed aluminum knob with four gravity settings: Flip the switch, change gravity.
The gravity switch is a tongue-in-cheek answer to one of the challenges facing the students as they designed a medical workstation for a prototype NASA lunar module. The conundrum: the module is meant for the moon, but will be tested on Earth. In Arizona, actually.
The medical workstation is currently at Houston’s Johnson Space Center where it is due to be installed with three other stations – geology, general maintenance, and extra-vehicular activity maintenance – in the cylindrical lunar module, according to Robert Howard, manager of NASA’s habitability design center.
As if traveling to Accra, Ghana isn’t enough, Ron Elgash – a professor in Rensselaer’s Department of Science and Technology Studies – is blogging about his research trip in the New York Times.
Eglash, who teaches in the Design, Innovation and Society program, has been blogging this week on the New York Times’ “Scientist at Work” blog about the adventures of field work. “Scientist at Work” is a relatively new blog for the New York Times, and has featured posts from researchers traveling in locations like Madagascar, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Alaska.
In the KNUST Guest House in Ghana.
Eglash is working on two projects during his stay in Ghana, which runs from June 29-July 12.
Play the video, take the challenge. I guarantee it’s not easy.
Here’s how it works: Watch the “dot figure” of a kicker as he approaches a soccer ball to kick it. As soon as you can, guess whether the ball will go left or right.
The video is a demonstration of an experiment on soccer penalty kicks run by Gabriel Diaz, a doctoral student in Cognitive Science. Diaz wants to know if – in the split-second before foot meets ball - a soccer player’s body betrays the direction the ball will go, and if goalkeepers might be picking up on those tell-tales.
One of many unique research programs and platforms at Rensselaer is the Mobile Studio. An NSF-funded research project in and of itself, the Mobile Studio is an amazingly innovative tool that literally transforms a student’s laptop into a mobile studio.
It’s “mobile” in the sense that the tool gives students the experience of using an oscilloscope, function generator, multimeter, and power supply, all in a package they can carry with them and plug into their laptop via USB. It’s a “studio” in the sense that the cost of the Mobile Studio’s hardware and software is about $130, compared to more than $10,000 for comparable equipment. (Check out the hardware specs here, and the software here.)
Above is an excellent video demonstating a new, simple technique from Profesor Sang-Kee Eah to create little layers of well-behaved nanoscale gold. Here’s how it works:
Eah and team infused liquid toluene — a common industrial solvent — with gold nanoparticles. The nanoparticles self-assemble and form a flat, closely packed layer of gold at the interface where the water and air meet.
After waiting a few minutes, the team uses a dropper to plop a few drops of the stuff into a substrate, or any other surface. The toluene evaporates pretty quickly, leaving behind a monolayer of gold. This monolayer, as you will see in the video, is a uniform, evenly-distributed layer. This is the first time anyone has accomplished this feat with nanogold, and the whole process takes only about 10 minutes. Check out the video to see the nanoparticles in action.
Summer break started last week at Rensselaer. When it’s not storming, temperatures around Troy slowly crescendo toward a sunny swelter.
But here’s a cooling thought: Professor Chip Kilduff has shared with us some stunning photography he and his colleagues took in December during a month-long research expedition to Antarctica.
(December is actually summer in Antarctica, and Kilduff said temperatures were around 10 degrees Fahrenheit – on par or even warmer than December temperatures half a world away in upstate New York.)
Kilduff, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was part of an international, interdisciplinary research team charged with collecting water samples and ice core samples to study the microbial communities found in the Antarctica’s Transantarctic Mountains and the McMurdo Dry Valleys. Conventional wisdom once deemed these areas were completely devoid of life, but we now know glacial ice in the region is home to bustling microhabitats that are “teeming with life.”
The stature of Rensselaer as a national locus and leader in the emerging field of Web science research is quickly crystallizing. We’ve known it to be the case for a while, and the rest of the country is finally catching on.
Faculty and students from the Institute’s Tetherless World Constellation have been hard at work backing up this reputation. Over the past eight months, the group has created more than 40 “mash-ups” of U.S. government data. These mash-ups connect previously unconnected data sets, taken from the year-old www.data.gov site, and combine them into something new and interesting.
The video sbove, created by doctoral student Dominic DiFranzo, is an excellent example. Dominic mashed up raw data on ozone and visibility readings in the United States with separate geographical data on where the readings were taken. This had not been done before, as the two data sets were released on separate Web sites using differing technologies. The result is a mash-up that plots this combined information in a way that’s interactive (i.e. clickable, zoomable, scrollable), user-friendly (it leverages the ubiquitous Google Maps platform), and intuitive. Check out this demo of the mash-up.
After you finish reading our new story on professor Shawn-Yu Lin’s most recent study, which is all about leveraging the interesting characteristics of nanoscale gold to boost the strength of infrared technology like satellite imaging and night-vision goggles, be sure to check out the above video.
The video is from last September when Lin spoke at the World Economic Forum “Summer Davos” meeting in Dalian, China. In just a few short minutes, Lin delivers a rich, impressive overview of the power of nanostructures and nanoengineering to impact photonics - in a range of applications as diverse as computer chips, solar power harvesting, solar power conversion, and others.
As a non-gamer, I have a feeling that what impressed me most about GameFest 7.0 is not what impressed the judges. I, who gave up video games with Ms. Pac-Man, was wow-ed by “Infinity Simulator,” a student-designed game in which players are suspended in a sort of trapeze harness (and equipped with virtual reality glasses) that senses their pitching and rolling movements and shifts the scene accordingly.
Ever fly in your dreams? This game is probably as close as you’ll get short of paragliding. In a videotaped demo run-through, developer Yehuda Duenas soars above a tropical island – the virtual world duly revolving in time with his in-harness somersaults - and then flies through a palm forest. Interestingly, the palm fronds themselves seem to dissolve just as he would smack into them.
Infinity Simulator was one of 17 games on display at today’s GameFest, an annual showcase of student work from Rensselaer’s Games and Simulation Arts & Sciences program, which was recently ranked 5th in the nation among game design programs.
Research and innovation involving light touches nearly every academic nook and cranny at Rensselaer, from Shawn Lin’s darkest material known to man (physics) and Christian Wetzel’s green LEDs (physics), to Larry Kagan’s beautiful steel and shadow sculptures (art), and Barb Cutler’s daylighting simulations (computer science), or a team of students using solar power to help kickstart a local dairy industry in rural Peru (engineering, STS).
Where the Smart Lighting Research Center is focused on optimizing, innovating, and transcending the science and technology that drives LEDs and solid state lighting, the Rensselaer Lighting Research Center is concerned with better understanding how we can use and innovate new lighting devices to create a more positive on society and the environment. Needless to say, both centers are populated with stellar students, researchers, and faculty.
Last week, graduate students from the Lighting Research Center (LRC) Lighting Workshop course showed off a unique class project: An interactive, immersive 3-D light-art exhibit that showcases the beauty, emotion, and science of light. Rather than building individual light-art exhibits, the students joined forces (not unlike Voltron) to create one massive installation. They called it Windows LT: Light, Materials and Dynamic Perception.
From blips and bleeps to spotlights and shadows, it was a visual feast.
