The Incredible Folding Bike

John Hunter at Curious Cat Engineering Blog has a great post on Dominic Hargreaves’ incredible new folding bike design.  John’s post links to a You Tube video showcasing this awesome design.  Every once in a while, you see something that is so well designed, so intuitive, that it takes your breath away.  This is one of those moments and design.  Enjoy!!

GM and Segway Team Up

General Motors and Segway (the company that gave us those nifty personal mobility devices) are teaming up to create a new urban vehicle that is small, electric and can carry two people. I think this is definitely where we need to go in the future. If (and that’s a BIG IF) GM is able to pull off this “reinvention” by teaming up with Segway, it might actually survive. Read about it here:

BBC News: “GM and Segway create new vehicle”

Wall Street Journal: “GM, Segway to make vehicle”

LA Times: “GM, Segway think 2 wheels”

New York Times: “G.M. Conjures Up a People-Moving Pod”

N.B. Remember where most of us bloggers get our news. From our newspaper companies!!!

Concrete Canoe 2009

I would like to present the following link to an article by Paula Davis in Tuesday’s Kalamazoo Gazette entitled “Can You Float a Concrete Canoe?” This article discusses the work of a group of students in the student chapter of the American Society of Civil Engineers at the College of Engineering, creating a concrete canoe out of concrete created from recycled or reused materials to enter into a regional engineering contest. You can access the article either via the link above or the URL below – you probably should access it soon as I don’t know how long MLIVE keeps stuff free.

http://www.mlive.com/news/kalamazoo/index.ssf/2009/03/can_you_float_a_concrete_canoe.html

Wired Blog: Toyota Wants to Build Car form Seaweed

This just in from Wired Blog:

Toyota Wants to Build Car from Seaweed – By Ben Mack

February 24, 2009

Quote: “Toyota is looking to a greener future — literally — with dreams of an ultralight, superefficient plug-in hybrid with a bioplastic body made of seaweed that could be in showrooms within 15 years.”

MIT Students Design Wearable Computers

Wired online has a great short article on a project some MIT students have worked on that enables a person to wear a virtual computer display on his or her body.  Read “TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense” by Kim Zetter, Wired Blog, Feb. 5, 2009.  The URL for the link is http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/ted-digital-six.html

43rd Senior Engineering Design Conference

The College of Engineering and Applied Sciences will hold its Fall 2008 Conference on Senior Engineering Design at the Parkview Campus from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Tuesday December 2, 2008.  This Fall’s conference will feature 36 presentations by senior design students in all CEAS departments.

You can download of a copy of the brochure from the CEAS Senior Design Conference website.

Unmanned Solar Plane – BBC News Bite 8.24.08

BBC News reports (August 24, 2008) that an unmanned solar powered plane or UAV has completed a record-setting three days in flight. This test flight is important because it demonstrates that an unmanned solar plane can power up its batteries during the daytime hours and then fly all night long on the stored energy. This would enable the plane, called the Zephyr-6 (and manufactured by the UK firm QinetiQ) to be used to scout out enemy territory very consistently over a long period of time.

Important technologies mentioned in this article:

• Ultra lightweight carbon fiber frame
• Amorphous silicon solar arrays that can be glued to the wings of the plane
• Rechargable lithium-sulphur batteries
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

Grand Challenges Identified – NAE

As a follow-up to my post from last year (“Grand Challenges for Engineering“, February 9, 2007) in which I discussed the initiative of the National Academy of Engineering to gather feedback from people all over the world regarding what they consider the ”Grand Challenges for Engineering”, the NAE has released a list of 14 grand challenges, as identified by their committee (and I assume the people who sent in feedback).  You can view their challenges here.  This exercise is a very valuable one in getting people to think constructively and creatively about our future – technological and otherwise.  If we do not educate our engineers (and our children for God’s sake) to think integratively (is that a word?) and ethically about how to use technology to help solve the problems we face, we’re not long for this world.

Robert Scoble Roasts the Amazon Kindle

If you want to see a good dissection of poor product design, take a look at Robert Scoble’s 13 minute roasting of the new Amazon Kindle eBook reader.  Scoble’s critiques and questions are exactly the kind of things you need to think of when you are designing a product to actually be USED by REAL PEOPLE.  Note especially Scoble’s consternation at how Amazon missed the boat regarding including social networking possibilities in this device (being able to purchase and send hard copies of books to friends, or being able to see what other Kindle users are reading).  It is quite a hilarious video – very educational.  I would consider showing it to every freshman engineering design class.  The URL for the video is below:

http://www.kyte.tv/channels/view.html?uri=channels/6118/77475

Fiala’s CEAS e-News on Patten’s Wind Turbine

You can read Jerrie Fiala’s latest issue of CEAS e-News, detailing the coming dedication of John Patten’s new wind turbine, by going here and downloading it in PDF.  The issue to download for this news article is the September 11 issue.