June 2006 Archives

Six students from the University of Naples Federico II, founded in 1224 in Naples, Italy, are happy. Why, you ask? No, it's not just because Italy knocked out Ukraine, 3-0, to earn a spot in the World Cup semi-final against Germany. The students are spending the next four months conducting research at UMR as part of a new scholar program between the two universities.

As part of the deal, , the students will work under the advisement of UMR faculty members and with funding from Mapei, a chemical construction company, and the national University Transportation Center at UMR.

Score!

Fresh off a trip to inspect some oil sands in Canada, Samuel Frimpong was ready to follow some of this summer's World Cup action. Frimpong, who studied mining engineering in Ghana, said that country's entry exceeded expectations during its first taste of World Cup action. Frimpong called the victory over the Czech Republic the high point. He says he rooted for both sides during the U.S. versus Ghana match (Ghana won, in case you weren't paying attention).

Meanwhile, Frimpong has remained focused on his oil sands research, which might prove useful in helping to reduce North America's dependence on foreign oil. We're working on a story about Frimpong's research -- in fact, we're working on several stories about uncoventional and potentially meaningful research efforts having to do with things like heavy hydrcarbons and biofuels (think algae!) -- for a special issue of UMR Magazine on alternative energy sources. But you'll have to wait until this fall to read all about it.

Oh, yeah, and Frimpong has just been named the new chair of UMR's mining and nuclear engineering department.

P.S. Frimpong has also lived in Canada, but we're not sure if they even have a soccer team.

Sprint Nextel CEO Gary Forsee, a 1972 civil engineering graduate from UMR, talks about the future of multimedia content on cell phones and other handheld devices in this interview published today on Forbes.com.

Visions has been getting slammed by “Nice site” blog comment spam for the past few days. We moderate comments but that just means that it doesn’t show up on the site. We still have to delete it and 500+ junk messages are just too much.

We want the feedback but need to fight spam too. We promise to open comments just as soon as we can. Thanks for understanding. In the meantime, feel free to let us know what you think by emailing news AT umr DOT edu.

While Nucor is in town to give UMR a cool $2 million (see post below), they decided to go ahead and pass around some extra pocket cash. After touring UMR's foundry, high school girls attending the Summer Solutions Camp were given a quiz to see what they had learned. Those with the six best scores on the quiz were surpised by a representative of Nucor, who handed each of them a hundred dollar bill. For these girls, who haven't even had a chance to enroll at UMR yet, an education in science and engineering is already paying off!

High school students will set up a fireworks display tonight at UMR, just days after federally approved fireworks went on sale in the state. But viewers can expect more than sparklers and bottle rockets; after all, these students have spent their week in Explosives Camp, where they shot dynamite, learned about detonators and blew stuff up -- all in a supervised environment, of course.

Due to the popularity of last year’s one-of-a-kind camp, UMR hosted two sessions of Explosives Camp this summer. Video from the first camp is available here(10.5 MB).

“We use the entertainment value for learning, and the students love it," says explosives expert Paul Worsey, a professor of mining engineering at UMR. “This year, we’re full. But it looks like we’ll be offering this camp as a regular feature in the future."

High school girls attending UMR's Summer Solutions Camp toured the foundry in McNutt Hall today. Meanwhile, representatives from Nucor were also on campus today -- Nucor has officially donated $2 million to create an endowment for a new steelmaking chair in UMR's materials science and engineering department.

National Geographic magazine takes a look at nanotechnology's big future this month. The magazine uses several comparisons to help put the size of the research into perspective. My favorite?

To put it another way, a nanometer is the amount a man's beard grows in the time it takes him to lift a razor to his face.

Being an electrical engineer these days is almost as dangerous as working on one of those Alaskan crab fishing boats -- at least it is during the World Cup. Electricity offices in Bangladesh and Argentina were stormed in the past weak by mobs of football (soccer) fans who were angry about power failures that interrupted television coverage of World Cup matches. The hooligans in Bangladesh were apparently wielding bamboo sticks. The Kansas City Star reported that the last time the entire country of Bangladesh was impacted by blackouts was in the 1990s, when a monkey electrocuted itself at the main hydroelectric facilty. Stay tuned for more developments regarding possible power outages during the World Cup -- unless, of course, the power goes out, in which case you won't be able to stay tuned. (This shouldn't be a problem in the U.S., because our electrical engineers are really good and nobody here really cares that much about soccer anyway.)

Judges told members of UMR's 2006 SAE Formula Car Team that they had a poor design. The judges apparently didn't like the aerodynamic wings on the back of the UMR car (see the wings on UMR's 2005 car at right). Fortunately for the team, the West Coast Formula SAE contest wasn't based solely on design theory. Out on the pavement, the UMR car finished first in the endurance event, beating the nearest competition by 20 seconds of raw time. Thanks to the great showing in the endurance event, UMR finished eighth overall out of more than 70 teams.

This was the first year for the Formula West competition, which was held June 14-17 at the California Speedway in Fontana, Calif. The SAE traditionally has one big competition each year near Detroit. UMR was coming off a disappointing finish in Michigan this year, so the team is pretty excited about its performance in California. Most of the members of UMR's team are mechanical and aerospace engineering majors.

We'd give you a link to SAE's official Formula West results, but the official results for these design contests are rarely available while they're still newsworthy (I've been googling all morning). If it weren't for emails from team members and for the fine folks in our student design center, we'd have to wait for the stone tablets to arrive just to find out how our UMR teams are doing in their various competitions.

Kavita Kumar of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch talks with Jay Goff and other enrollment management folks about the "the gamble colleges take when deciding how many students to accept."

"In deciding how many students to admit, it's more of an art than a science," said Jay Goff, head of enrollment management at the University of Missouri at Rolla.

Get the full scoop here.

It's been a few months since we switched Visions from a quarterly webzine to a blog format. Now we'd like to know what readers think about the switch, so we created this totally unscientific, self-selecting poll to find out. Talk about bad science. But, hey, we'll do anything for a comment or two. Have your say with the survey below, and feel free to leave a comment to let us know how we're doing and how we could improve.

Visions readers poll
What do you think of Visions' new blog format?	Much better than the old quarterly webzine Much worse than the old quarterly webzine Doesn't make a difference to me New format? What new format?
	Current Results

Frances Bryant, a research assistant at UMR's Virtual Reality & Rapid Prototyping Lab, gives Women's Wear Daily the scoop behind 3-D prototyping.

A 3-D product prototype is an essential communication tool around which design, development, sales and marketing people rally before finalizing a style. New ideas may begin as a sketch on a cocktail napkin before they are converted to 3-D models on a computer, but until a concept takes physical form, it’s hard for most people to grasp, and that can delay decisions.

Three-dimensional printing is one of several manufacturing processes that fall into the larger family of rapid prototyping. “Rapid prototyping is a way to create a three-dimensional part in a quick manner," said Frances Bryant, a research assistant at the Virtual Reality & Rapid Prototyping Lab at the University of Missouri-Rolla. “Instead of setting up fixtures, tools, etc., in a factory to create a model, everything is done with a computer program and a machine that can make a part on demand in a relatively short time."

* The complete article is available only to WWD.com subscribers.

This July, UMR will dish up a new camp for high school juniors and seniors who love working with computers and digital technology.

The Computer Highly Interactive Program, aka CHIP, Camp will include hands-on projects in computer science, computer engineering and information science and technology. Campers will also conduct lab experiments, listen to Tech Talk guest speakers, race duct-tape rafts, compete in gaming tournaments and lounge by the pool.

Sounds tasty!

Ming Leu and Venkata Allada are heading up a major National Science Foundation conference in St. Louis next month.

Approximately 500 are expected to attend the 2006 NSF Design, Service and Manufacturing Grantees and Reseasrch Conference, which is being hosted by UMR. Early registration ends Thursday.

The conference, sponsored by the NSF Division of Design and Manufacturing Innovation, promises to cover a wide range of research trends and technology innovations, from building the hydrogen economy to developing sustainable manufacturing. Additional sponsors include the UMR Intelligent Systems Center, Boeing and Emerson.

UMR professors Charles C. Chusuei and Yangchuan Xing, with graduate students Robert V. Hull and Liang Li, recently reported success with characterizing the surfaces of carbon nanotube fuel cell catalysts. The National Synchroton Light Source, a scientific facility that is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, recently reported on the team's research, which appeared in the April 6 issue of the journal Chemistry of Materials.

From the NSLS story:

Characterizing the surface structure of catalyst materials is important for the improvement of current fuel cell technology, which promises to deliver an environmentally benign means of energy production. Using x-rays produced at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS), researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla (UMR) were able to detect the presence of PtOx at the outer-most perimeters of a potential catalyst: platinum nanoparticles tethered to carbon nanotubes. At the same time, they determined that its bulk composition was predominantly metallic.

Fuel cells are devices capable of generating electrical energy directly without involving a thermal cycle that typically release greenhouse gases, such as CO and NOx, into the atmosphere. Today, burning coal is still the primary and most efficient (with regard to power density) means of electrical energy production in the United States. New information obtained from a study performed at the NSLS may help catalyst researchers design improved fuel cell devices that can compete with current fossil fuel technology.

UMR's automomous robots -- the new Optical Prime and last year's Stereo Opticon -- are in Michigan this weekend, battling "brainiac" vehicles from 32 other universities, including Trixxie from Georgia Institute of Technology and Johnny 5 from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

The Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition will run June 10-12 at Selfridge Air National Guard Base near Detroit. And while most university teams will enter four-wheel models, the UMR team is betting its three-wheel-drive vehicle will out maneuver the competition.

Orange cones are placed throughout the obstacle course. The robots must be able to differentiate colors and sizes, among other things. Team members have outfitted the UMR vehicles, which run on rechargeable batteries, with sonar and infrared sensors, stereo cameras and global positioning systems.

More about the competition is available here and here.

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded UMR's materials science and engineering department $100,000 for the continued development of glass-based seals for solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs). "What we're doing is developing glasses that will hermetically seal the different components in a fuel cell," says the department chair, Dr. Richard Brow.

The UMR team is trying to engineer compatible materials that can operate over long periods of times at high temperatures. They start out with a form of glass that is converted to a ceramic material. The glass melts to form a seal and then crystallizes as a ceramic. Tests are conducted on campus to evaluate changes in material properties -- with heat treatments up to 800 degrees for several months.

According to Brow, the real engineering challenge is to find materials that maintain their integrity during repeated periods of heating and cooling. That's where the glass research comes in. "We're trying to develop sealing materials that expand and contract with temperature to the same degree as other SOFC materials," says Brow, who has been working on the problem for several years. "We're close to the point where the technology can be commercialized. Finding a way to hermetically seal an SOFC is very important. That's probably why we got funded. The DOE recognizes the importance of solving this problem."

UMR physicist Alexey Yamilov is part of a team researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and UMR that has developed an ultrasound version of the laser. Called the uaser (pronounced WAY-zer), the instrument produces ultrasonic waves that are coherent and of one frequency, and could be used to study laser dynamics and detect subtle changes, such as phase changes, in modern materials.

"We have demonstrated that the essential nature of a laser can be mimicked by classical mechanics - not quantum mechanics - in sound instead of light," said Richard Weaver, a professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at the University of Illinois. Weaverwill present the findings today at the annual Acoustical Society of America meeting. Yamilov plans to present the research to the Optical Society of America in the fall.

Technorati tags: physics, acoustics, science, lasers, ultrasound, materials science

One day, you might be able to buy your very own version of a UMR solar house. Dr. Stuart Baur, advisor to the UMR Solar House Team, says he gets inquiries from people all the time about buying one of the university's solar houses or at least purchasing the plans. With this in mind, Baur is interested in partnering with a company that sells manufactured homes. Because UMR's houses have to be capable of quick assembly, they are constructed in units and are put together a lot like quality manufactured homes. Baur imagines rows of solar houses in a futuristic trailer park, where none of the residents have to worry about utility bills. UMR is currently plannings its own solar village near campus; and the solar house team will soon start construction on its house for the 2007 Solar Decathlon. This time, the Department of Energy is kicking in $100,000 to support the project.

Our resident English student abroad, Amy Edwards, sent us the following dispatch from Sweden.

Apparently I can’t get enough of Glimmingehus Castle, known as Scandinavia’s best-preserved medieval manor, because I’ve already managed to visit it twice.

The multiple outings weren’t intentional. Somehow, however, I went on two separate field trips to two different Swedish locales that squeezed in a Glimmingehus visit along the way. Built as a safety fortress in 1499, with the foundation laid by Danish knight Jens Holgersen Ulfstand, Glimmingehus has evolved from housing 17th century Danish nobles to hosting modern-day rearchers, interested in studying the archeological and building history of the former residence. Archeaological excavations have been conducted in the area since 1935, and many scholars kindly refer to Glimmingheus as "archeaologists’ favorite fortress."

I don't remember a world without AIDS.

I was 4 years old when the first cases were reported. The disease, and the unknown, terrorized people and stigmatized the afflicted.

Twenty five years later, we know a lot more about how the disease is spread. And although we don't have a cure, scientists are pushing to develop ways to help those suffering. Nuran Ercal is one of those scientists. Working with William Banks, professor of geriatric medicine at Saint Louis University, Ercal has found that a newly redesigned antioxidant may play a critical role in preventing HIV-1-associated dementia, a condition that a third of the adults and half of the children with AIDS develop.

Their research will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Experimental Neurology.

Now if only the golden anniversary could bring with it a cure.