Engineering to inspire

Nanomachines Digest

Nanomachines are supposed to be the holy grail of materials. After all, these smaller-than-molecule sized machines could assemble any structure by “atomic-scale "pick and place": a set of nanoscale pincers would pick individual atoms from their environment and place them where they should go.”

And when we say any structure, we mean any structure – from planes to bread to virus-zapping cells. That’s the beauty of Nanomachines and Nanotechnology.

Instead of repeating what’s out there, we’ve put together a digest on Nanomachines and how they can be used in the future:

The Once and Future Nanomachine (Scientific American)
Nanomachines Get Their Orders (BBC)
Nanotechnology, Nanomachines, Nanobots and non-biomolecule Nanobiotech! (Radical Technology)
This week’s posts on UCreateChange

Featured Video: Engineers create clean water

So what goes into cleaning scummy, icky river water? First you’ll need to filter bugs, leaves and other ugh stuff. Then it’s off to the disinfectant unit which kills off unseen bacteria with UV light. Now it’s finally safe to drink.

Guess who built it?

It takes a lot of work to make that clean, clear drinking water you use. Imagine what it takes to bring clean water to a remote village. Watch what it takes to make your imagination a reality.

Like this video?
Subscribe to UCreateChange’s YouTube Channel!

Featured Video: Healthcare in the future

Microsoft’s view of the future for healthcare is all about communicating with each other

Like the Diabetic medicine cylinders (1:36 mark) that glow red when empty. Perfect for reminding patients to refill their medicine. Or patients and clinical researchers “talking” to their doctors without meeting in person (2:30 mark).

Now put it all on the go and you’ve got a winner.

Taken from the Mix08 presentation by Daniel Makowski

Like this video?
Subscribe to UCreateChange’s YouTube Channel!

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.

Featured Video: The Wound Pump

Danielle Zurovcik, a doctoral student at MIT, created a hand-powered suction-healing system that speeds up healing of open wounds.

To put the awesomeness of this invention in context, traditional suction-healing systems cost at least $100/day and need to be recharged every six hours. This one costs $3 to make, sustain and use.

That’s a godsend for poor places and countries. So why aren’t we seeing more of these things being invented?

Development of a Simplified Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (sNPWT) Device.

Like this video?
Subscribe to UCreateChange’s YouTube Channel!

Engineering a Superman

What happened on UCreateChange.com (5-11 Apr 2010)

If you were following last week’s postings on UCreateChange.com, then you’ll notice that it’s all about how technology changes us, humans. That got us thinking about making a superman from last week’s posts.

With all due respect to Dr Manhattan from The Watchmen, here’s we’ll make our superman.

Sorry, I couldn’t figure out how to create an image map on this blog. So I thought I’d just splash up this image and put up the links below:

Comments welcome as usual.

Featured Video: The emotion behind invention

Dean Kamen never did complete school. That didn’t stop him from inventing things to help people. He built the Segway and now he’s building prosthetic limbs for war veterans – 20 years old war veterans with an arm or none.

This talk on his prosthetic arm is riveting and moving. Listen to it and understand why he does what he does.

Soldiers who've lost limbs in service face a daily struggle unimaginable to most of us. At TEDMED, Dean Kamen talks about the profound people and stories that motivated his work to give parts of their lives back with his design for a remarkable prosthetic arm.

Like this video?
Subscribe to UCreateChange’s YouTube Channel!

Featured video: Psychiatry + engineering = ?

Since we’re talking about bioengineering this week, we searched for videos that have something to do with that field. Somehow we found this fascinating video on Optogenetics: controlling the brain with light.

We’ll let Karl Deisseroth talk about his findings and invention:

Karl Deisseroth is pioneering bold new treatments for depression and other psychiatric diseases. By sending pulses of light into the brain, Deisseroth can control neural activity with remarkable precision. In this short talk, Deisseroth gives an thoughtful and awe-inspiring overview of his Stanford University lab's groundbreaking research in "optogenetics".

Like this video?
Subscribe to UCreateChange’s YouTube Channel!

Bioengineering for a better life

Bioengineering sounds esoteric but really, it isn’t.

According to Wikipedia’s Bioengineering entry:

biological engineers attempt to either mimic biological systems in order to create products or modify and control biological systems so that they can replace, augment, or sustain chemical and mechanical processes.

Like spectacles – invented since 1200 for scholars and monks – or its modern evolution: the contact lenses. Or wooden teeth and ceramic dentures. Or an Egyptian pharaoh’s false toe to an Italian robotic hand that moves when we think “grab”. Or an artificial heart to replace a faulty heart riddled with holes. There are many more examples at UCreateChange.com Health posts.

You can see that bioengineering’s has been around for yonks. It’s just that we’re taking its inventions and products for granted for yonks as well.

It’s changed since.

Bioengineering is now a recognised field that doctors, surgeons and common folk rely on to make a difference in our lives. So instead of doing inane “turn off your lights for one hour in a year” (ala Earth Hour), think/find out how we can improve humanity from within.

After all, as a wise Chinese man once said:

“If there is light in the soul, there will be beauty in the person.
If there is beauty in the person, there will be harmony in the house.
If there is harmony in the house, there will be order in the nation.
If there is order in the nation, there will be peace in the world.”

So take care of man and the rest will fall in place.

Featured Video: Coffee Health Benefits

We were talking to Amberhaze last week and we both agree on one thing: we need our coffees in the morning. But what does it really do? And how does it keep us awake?

So we trawled YouTube and found this nifty video by Discovery Channel, which talks about how coffee might prevent cancer, and more importantly jolts us awake!

Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more videos.

Benefits of coffee. src: How Stuff Works

UCreateChange roundup: Cybernetics

4-10 Jan 2010

Think “yellow elephants with polka dots and white bananas”.

And it’ll be picked up by a tiny brain electrode and turned into speech on your laptop. Not for mass consumption but perfect for folk who can’t speak on their own.

Talking about thoughts...Christian Kandlbauer’s new robot arms respond to his commands wired to his chest from his mind. And they’re agile enough to help him pass his driving test! And if he needs directions, just use SixthSense, a wearable gestural interface developed by MIT researchers, to find out where he’s at by beaming (yes, we’re not joking) a light onto a street sign and getting digital information from it.

Mod thy body: Human engineering

We’re never satisfied.

We’ve got to be faster, stronger, prettier, smarter and wiser (although that’s arguable) than the next person. That’s why we Humans are fascinated with modifying and augmenting our bodies; be it with ink on skin, or a pirate’s hook hand, or a chip implanted in the brain, or bones borne from wood.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

After all, if the deaf could hear again, if we could help people walk once more, if we could access and manipulate information through a chip in our head – then why not?

For this blog post, we’ll look at how engineers and inventors have improved upon the human body in augmenting reality with digital information and of course, replacing lost body parts.

Don’t forget to check out this week’s cybernetic series at UCreateChange!