Visions

Only 121 days until 2010 St. Pat's Best Ever!

We thought some of you alumni out there would want to know about a new iPhone app (iTunes link) that lets you keep track of how many days -- um, excuse me, "daze" -- there are until the next Best Ever St. Pat's Celebration. Some of our creative entrepreneurial students created this to help get the word out about their company, IDC. We just posted the news about this app, so you're getting the scoop.

So what are you waiting for? Get the app. It's free! And it could be the best app ever. We know it's definitely the Best Ever app.

While we're on the subject, it's only a few months before we start posting stuff on our Best Ever Blog about next year's St. Pat's Celebration. Which, by the way, is only 121 days away. (Of course, if you had this iPhone app, you'd already know that.)

S&T's prohibition era expert Kate Drowne is quoted in today's Newsday:

Even though flapper dresses were knee-length, it was still enough to raise eyebrows, said Kathleen Drowne, an associate English professor at Missouri University of Science and Technology who has written on the time period.

"This is still coming off a generation previously where if a woman showed her ankle in public, that was something to look at twice," Drowne said.

Read the full story here. 

There's been a lot of research-related activity under way on campus. Here's a rundown of some of the biggies:

• Fun in the sun. Missouri S&T's entry in this year's Solar Decathlon -- dubbed Team Missouri, since it's a joint venture with students from the University of Missouri-Columbia -- is the fourth solar-powered home built by S&T students. Our campus is one of only two universities in the world to have entered each of the four Solar Decathlons (in 2002, 2005, 2007 and this year). Right now, our team is in ninth place. Keep track of S&T's/MU's progress via the Solar Decathlon's Team Missouri page, or follow along at the Experience This! blog.

• Workin' in a coal mine. This is old news for some of us on campus, but we're glad to see more interest in David Summers' work to turn abandoned underground mines into farms for biodiesel feedstock. Summers, a Curators' Professor of mining engineering, sees a big future in growing algae in underground mines.

• Waving the white flag. While some of us are still bitter about the St. Louis Cardinals' early departure from post-season play, at least the team made it to the post-season. Many teams with no chance of making the playoffs give up their star performers in hopes of a better chance in the future. Those so-called white-flag trades are the subject of some interesting research by Samantha Schussele, a nuclear engineering major who loves baseball. She's working with Michael Davis of the S&T economics department on her statistical analysis of how white-flag trades affect attendance.

• Frontiers of engineering. Congratulations to Sahra Sedigh, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, who has been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering's Frontiers of Engineering Education symposium. She is one of 49 young engineering researchers and teachers who will come together "to become a major force in identifying, recognizing and promulgating advances and innovations in order to build a strong intellectual infrastructure and commitment to 21st-century engineering education," says NAE President Charles N. Vest. It's great to have a Missouri S&T faculty member involved in this important national discussion.

• Off to Estonia. Congratulations, too, to Eric Showalter, a lecturer in civil, architectural and environmental engineering, who is heading to Estonia on a Fulbright scholarship. Keep up with Eric's adventures by following his blog.

The writers of the automotive blog Car Spy Guide like to scope out the latest in car design and innovation. As they put it on their blog's about section, the writers are "snooping for the latest automotive news that the car companies don't want you to see." But apparently they're also looking elsewhere, because they recently discovered Missouri S&T's EcoCAR Team and have featured our team on their site.

S&T is one of 17 universities in the U.S. and Canada participating in the EcoCAR Challenge, a competition that requires student teams to re-engineer a GM vehicl to minimize energy consumption, emissions and greenhouse gases while maintaining utility, safety, and performance.

The car spies laud our team for "its commitment to hydrogen energy. Being the only school to use hydrogen as its source of energy shows Missouri S&T's commitment to the future of transportation without relying on gasoline."

You'll be hearing more about this team in the near future. And we promise, it won't be cloak-and-dagger stuff.

You can also check the team's blog for updates, as well as S&T's news site.

Let's be honest. No one really likes to think about where stuff goes when toilets are flushed, showers are used or dishes are washed. It's not something anyone wants to think about - unless maybe it's part of their job, like it is for one of our alums, Brandon Freeman.

But I digress. My point is this - most of us living in the U.S. are fortunate to have a system for our wastewater to be treated, whether it be through treatment plants or septic tanks. But that's not how it works at many of our forward operating bases in Iraq and Afghanistan. Daily convoys of more than 20 trucks are used to supply a base with fuel or water and dispose of wastewater and solid waste.

But Jianmin Wang, a professor of civil, architectural and environmental engineering at Missouri S&T, has an idea that could change that. His system, housed inside a shipping container, is good that it could be deployed anywhere - from small, rural communities to forward operating bases, like those in Iraq or Afghanistan. It's a pretty cool system that's low power, low maintenance and highly efficient.

Cheaper, better and faster - who knew you could get all three?

Here are some research stories we've been working on:

S&T researchers study carbon sequestration for City Utilities in Springfield

Future engineers encouraged to embrace transformational changes

Also, I got in trouble the last time I published a link to non-campus research news about evolution. But here's a story that has some teeth to it. (Kinda reminds me of the blurb we published about the S&T grad who discovered the world's largest snake.)

Stephen Gao's work on monitoring earthquakes in the Midwest (which we reported on previously) continues to attract attention. The latest media coverage comes from Voice of America, which dispatched a reporter to meet with Gao and his graduate students earlier this summer. The result is this news story: EarthScope Advances Quake Prediction.

Here's an excerpt:

EarthScope is part of a huge project to seismographically map the continental U.S. and Alaska. "The idea is to use 400 seismographs to cover the whole U.S. in about 14 years," Gao explains, adding that the information that will come from those monitors is designed to help scientists predict, not prevent, earthquakes. "[But if] you can predict one, then you can do something to lessen the damage caused by an earthquake," he points out. "People can come out of their house and camp outside. You can shut down the power, the natural gas lines. In that situation, you can reduce the damage a lot."

EarthScope began putting down seismometers on the U.S. west coast in 2002 and is moving its operations eastward across the country. The project is currently entering the area of the New Madrid fault zone, in Missouri and several nearby states. It's the site of one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded in North America.

Last month, Science Daily talked to Gao about what days -- and what times of days -- earthquakes are likely to happen. They seem to be more frequent on Sundays or late at night, but Gao says "that's just because it's quiet" during those times.

Researchers at Missouri S&T have figured out why earthquakes tend to be recorded more frequently in the late night hours -- and on Sundays.

Once again, Missouri S&T researchers are leading the way in nanomaterials.

Today, the journal Chemistry of Materials published online an article describing how Dr. Jay A. Switzer, the Professor of Discovery in S&T's chemistry department, and his team grew zinc nanoscale zinc oxide crystals on a single-crystal silicon (full article | press release).

The research on these little crystals -- Switzer calls them "nanospears" -- could yield big results for the future of solar energy. That's because both zinc oxide and silicon are semiconductors, and by perfectly aligning the two materials, engineers could create a new breed of solar cell that absorbs more of the solar spectrum, thereby increasing the efficiency of solar cells.

The other cool thing about Switzer's work in this area is that he's come up with an inexpensive way to grow zinc oxide on silicon. It's been done before -- but not on the cheap. Previously, researchers have had to use expensive ultra-high-vacuum methods. Switzer just uses a beaker and some alkaline solution -- and gets a better result.

Defense-related research projects at Missouri S&T stand to gain $15 million through the Defense Appropriations bill, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this week. According to a press release from U.S. Rep. Joann Emerson, whose 8th Congressional District includes Rolla, the bill contains $3 million for power generation and storage systems, $3 million for robotic weapons systems, $3 million for heat-resistant materials used in hypersonic flight and $6 million to detect and track explosive materials such as Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), a topic we wrote about a few days ago.