Why women engineers rock…

What happened on UCreateChange.com (19-25 Apr 2010)

Women are as inventive as men.

The Spelbots is a great example. The all-woman engineering team built robots to play soccer. The efforts of these girls paid off as they came in second at the RoboCup 2009 (Osaka). That achievement’s nothing to be sneezed at.

In fact they’ve torn apart notions that engineering is a “guy” thing. Naturally there are differences. When guys compete to showcase their ideas, women tend to be more accepting.

According to their mentor professor Andrew Williams, “There tends to be more of a social side [to it]…Teamwork basically. There’s an emphasis on collaboration, creativity, social aspects of computer science.”

In fact the social part of engineering (or related disciplines) is important for women engineers.

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Climate Change: what saves us

What happened on UCreateChange.com (12-18 Apr 2010)

The TV tells us that climate change is bad. It’s true. Sadly, most of us might know it but we won’t feel it.

That’s frightening because it’ll amount to just lip service on our part – all talk, no action. And climate change is getting worse… just step outside, ain’t it hot? Eventually, we’d live on our own wastes and making homes in wastelands.

Thankfully we’ve got a small group of people who are doing something about it.

Like these architects who turn their buildings into eco-friendly paradises. Or hydrogels that might just replace plastics. Or a safer way to dispose of Evian water bottles with hungry fungus.

These Indonesian students took the cake. They might have just solved Indonesia’s landfill problem by inventing a method that uses oranges to dissolve styrofoam. That’s Nobel prize worthy!

And if you’ve a unwanted phone. Why not recycle it into gold?

This is just the tip of the iceberg (or what’s left of them in the Artic circle), there are many more inventions that can save our world. And if technology got us here, perhaps it’s technology that will get us out of this mess.

If you know of any save-the-world type inventions, tell us about it in the comments!

Featured Video: Organic Environmental Tech

At first play, this YouTube offering felt like a brochure/101 video. What we liked about it is how it advocates using micro-organisms to help clean up our messes. It’s safer, less toxic and easier to manage for us all. These helpful buggers are called “Effective Micro-organisms” (EM). And if we find a way to use them,maybe we’ll finally sync up with world.

That good stuff starts at 2:43.

Introduction to the Power of Organic Environmental Technology: harnessing Mother Nature's tiniest creatures to clean up any toxic environment; bringing hope for safe drinking water to those in need; enabling industry to effectively recycle solid waste and wastewater; acting as a natural insect pest control, natural weed control, and much more.

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Recycling: What goes out, comes back in

Buy a phone. Chuck a phone.

Where does your old phone go? Into your “forgot-me” drawer? Down the rubbish chute with peeled bananas or soggy leftovers?

Regardless your old phone is now trash. It’s the same for the cranky laptops, buzzy mp3 players, and defunct electronics that were thrown out over the months.

That is a problem, and it has a name: E-waste.

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The Guts Of Recycling: Behind the scenes

Remember our teaser post on turning handphone into gold?

It’s true. And we’ve got the video to prove it.

In addition to gold, recyclers can extract copper, paper, plastics and precious metals from our E-waste via the recycling process. And that’s the interesting part of it.

According to Adrian Tan, executive director of Tes-Amm (Singapore), “What gets people interested is the precious metals that you see recovered. Very often, that equates to gold. There are resources but there isn’t a lot of it. It takes a huge volume [about 50,000 phones] to generate 1 kg of gold bar.”

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Featured Video: Saving Garbage???

Environmental engineers safeguard the quality of land, air and water. They investigate contaminants for each one of these items.

Imagine if they’re not around. How do you make sure that s**t doesn’t get into your drinking water? How do you make sure that pollutants are safely disposed of?

But it’s more than rubbish dumps and landfills. Singapore is trending towards green buildings that recycle their own waste water and air, and draw power from the sun.

Guess who’s responsible for it all?

Environmental engineering is concerned with the quality of land, air and water, and engineers primarily investigate contaminants for each one of these items. Find out how environmental engineers research those things in the environment that affect our health with help from a solid waste planning engineer and recycling program coordinator in this free video on environmental engineering.

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From Phone to Gold Bar

*Mumble mumble*. Turn this mobile phone into gold! Poof!!!

BECOMES

 

600 grams of gold = $33,800.

That’s $33,800 in my palm… Woah…

More next Wednesday!