August 2006 Archives

Superconductors aren't just fabulous with trains and symphonies -- they might also be used to solve a lot of the world's energy problems eventually. Dr. Fatih Dogan has been busy trying to cultivate superconducting materials in his UMR laboratory, but he also found time to co-author a paper published this week in Nature Physics.

The future’s so bright at the state’s premier technological research university that students might want to consider wearing shades.

For the first time in UMR history, the three top leadership positions on Student Council are held by women. “It is amazing to see people stand up and take notice when passionate women leaders break the norm and accomplish their goals,” says StuCo President Lauren Huchingson, a senior in information science and technology. The council's two vice presidents are Beth Groenke, a junior in engineering management, who is in charge of external relations, and Kelly McCoy, a junior in electrical engineering, who is VP of internal affairs. Full story.

(In photo, from left: UMR Student Council officers Lauren Huchingson, Kelly McCoy and Beth Groenke.)

Pluto has been demoted. Our solar system has been reduced to eight planets, now that Pluto has been reclassified as a "dwarf planet." Meeting in Prague this week, the International Astronomical Union set new standards for what it takes to be a planet and Pluto didn't make the cut.

Although you can't see Pluto, you can check out the moon and other celestial bodies at the UMR Observatory, which opens its doors to the public for Visitors' Nights every spring and fall. It's free! Upcoming dates are:

8:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 1
7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 29
7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1

The UMR researchers who are studying the sinkhole that swallowed Norman Scrivener's garage in Nixa, Mo., were recently featured during a KY-3 (Springfield) newscast. The story is now available online.

P.S. Is there anybody out there? Our ability to receive comments was compromised for so long (by spam robots or some dang thing) that we kinda feel like we're out of touch. But every thing should be hunky-dory with the comments feature now, so fire away.

Drs. Neil Anderson and Derek Apel are spending this week at the sinkhole that swallowed Norman Scrivener's garage in Nixa, Mo. Anderson, a geological engineer, and Apel, a mining engineer, are conducting geophysical survey scans at the site to see what other surprises might be lurking below the surface. The Springfield News-Leader published a story about the research efforts this morning.

UMR will soon begin offering undergraduate degrees in civil and electrical engineering on the campus of Missouri State University, assuming plans formally announced on Monday come to fruition. UMR will lend -- as the Springfield News-Leader put it -- the "prowess" of its faculty to the partnership. Pictured from left to right at Monday's signing ceremony in Rolla are (front row) University of Missouri President Elson S. Floyd, MSU President Michael T. Nietzel and UMR Chancellor John F. Carney III. Standing are Dr. Charles McClain, interim commissioner of the Missouri Department of Higher Education, and Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt.

A noted Shakespeare expert, Dr. Nick Knight also knows model trains. The retired UMR professor has a bunch of them in a barn, and he can run 14 engines at a time. There are more than 100 locomotive models in his collection. He also has 5,000 toy soldiers and 26 battlefields, but that's another story.

Knight has been instrumental in putting together an exhibit, "Trains: Past, Present and Future," which opens this weekend in Clayton. The exhibit features models, paintings, photographs and more. The opening from 1-3 p.m. Sunday is free (The Artists Guild, Two Oak Knoll Park, Clayton).

For more information, read the Post-Dispatch article that we lifted the above information from.

As UMR's popularity continues to rise, so does our reputation.

U.S.News & World Report announced its college rankings today and the UMR undergraduate engineering program is ranked 48th on the list among schools that offer doctoral degrees. That's up three spots from last year's ranking of 51. If you only count public colleges and universities, UMR ranks 26th.

The annual U.S. News guidebook, America's Best Colleges 2007, hits newsstands next week.

UMR also nabbed the No. 54 spot on the guidebook's listing of the nation's top doctoral-granting public universities. We rank 112, when private institutions are counted.

Opening Week at UMR culminates with the annual Project X competition, a remote-controlled car race through campus. Classes don't officially begin until Monday, but incoming freshmen have been on campus all week to get acclimiated to college life. Mostly they're just having fun. This year, teams of freshmen designed remote-controlled vehicles that were capable of maneuvering through various hazards. The catch was that each vehicle had to carry some sort of barge that could in turn carry the vehicle across the "River of Doom."

The fall semester starts on Monday, and UMR is expected to have the third-largest freshman class ever. Here are five facts about UMR's tech-savvy freshman:

1. 94 percent will bring a computer to campus

2. 70 percent of those computers will be laptops -- ideal for mobile students on one of the nation's most connected campuses

3. 95 percent of them plan to bring a cell phone to campus

4. 51 percent of them spend 6 hours or more online each week

5. 14 percent spend more than 15 hours per week online

Tags: freshmen, college, zeitgeist, higher education, technology

Jack Kerouac played football at Columbia University, but he wasn't really the MBA type. Fortunately for UMR, Joe Winters is the MBA type. In addition to being the first student admitted to UMR's new MBA program, Winters has joined the football team as a quarterback. Winters played football in the Ivy League (he tossed a touchdown pass against Harvard last season) and earned a bachelor's degree at Columbia, but he still has one year of eligibility remaining. So this season he's suiting up for the Miners and going to graduate school.

With terror alerts adding to the restrictions airline passengers face -- and those restrictions slowing people down even more at the airport -- it might be quicker and easier to fly yourself to your destination.

UMR's mechanical and aerospace engineering department can help you with that. This fall, Bob Oetting will offer a Private Pilot Ground School to teach prospective pilots everything they need to know to pass the FAA's Private Pilot, Recreational Pilot and Sport Pilot written tests. The group will meet on Monday and Thursday nights in September and October.

Ok, it's not JUST UMR, but education was one category editors from Bizjournals looked at when compiling their list of small communities with the best quality of life. Rolla, Mo., is 13th on the list -- and second in the Midwest region. The study is aimed at people who are considering a move to a small town. Highest-scoring towns had a strong economy, light traffic, moderate cost of living, good access to big-city attractions and (here's where UMR comes in) first-class educational systems. Go Rolla!

Check out bizjournals.com for the complete ranking.

As part of her annual Farm Tour, U.S. Representative Jo Ann Emerson (pictured) visited campus today to meet with a pair of UMR chemical engineers who've devised a way to make ethanol using things like corn stalks, rice hulls and various types of wood - like the leaves and branches typically left over by the forestry industry.

Missouri recently made the switch to E10 to replace straight gasoline. We'll need 13 billion gallons of ethanol per year to keep up with demand. If we go with E85, we'd need 123 billion gallons of the stuff. If 100 percent of the state's corn grain were used for ethanol production, it would only yield 30 billion gallons. Considering some of that grain also has to go to the food market for people and animals, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that an alternative fuel source is needed.

Enter Neil Book and Olliver Sitton.

Earlier this month, a team of students from the UMR chapter of Engineers Without Borders traveled to Bolivia. The students traveled to Bolivia's rain forest region to assess the needs of Rio Colorado Technical Agricultural High School, which -- despite its rain forest setting -- lacks a safe a sustainable water supply (see Water Wanted from last month's blog). The team plans to build a system for the school on a return trip next spring.

While in Bolivia, the group also visited a tiny village deep in the Andes Mountains to check on a latrine project they worked on last year.

Now, they're on their way back from South America. Team member David Longrie of Grover, Mo., a senior in civil engineering, filed this brief report from the nation's capital, La Paz.

Hello from La Paz, Bolivia!

The team has just completed our assessment of Rio Colorado school. After discussing with the parents and faculty of the school, we have decided on drilling a new well and providing an alternative power source to help supply power longer than the 3 hours daily.

We have also just returned from Inka Katurapi where our team in May built a composting latrine. The village has kept up its side of the deal and has begun work on the second latrine.

We wish you all the best from Bolivia.

The Rio Colorado Team

Mariesa Crow, the current dean of UMR's School of Materials, Energy and Earth Resources, will soon become the Fred W. Finley Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. (Here's the official announcement.) The professorship is named for a 1941 UMR electrical engineering graduate. Now deceased, Finley was the founder of Finley Engineering Co. in Lamar, Mo.

An expert in energy storage applications and one of the key researchers in UMR's power engineering program, Crow has also been named director of the campus's Energy Research and Development Center. The ERDC is a new initiative designed to bring UMR's myriad energy research efforts under one umbrella.

UMR has about 35 faculty members -- and dozens of graduate and undergraduate students -- working on energy-related research projects across campus. The projects range from research on the distribution of coal, natural gas and electricity to the development of systems for renewable energy resources, such as bio-diesel, hydrogen power and wind power.

Tags: energy, energy research, electrical engineering, computer engineering, UMR, University of Missouri-Rolla, University of Missouri

Congratulations to our intrepid editor, Mindy Limback, who welcomed a baby girl to the planet this morning. Allison Grace Limback was born at 8:01 a.m. She weighs 7.7 pounds and measures 19 1/4 inches long. Allison and her parents are doing fine.

Steel has long been the material of choice when it comes to needing strength. Imagine if Superman was the "Man of Aluminum" or the "Man of Wood" or something. It just wouldn't be right. At any rate, a group of UMR students has received a $47,500 grant to compare steel with other construction and manufacturing materials. Products to be compared in the study include structural steel versus wood in residential construction, steel cans versus plastic frozen food containers in the food container market, steel roofing versus standard asphalt shingles in residential construction and automotive-quality steel body panels versus aluminum. The students are especially interested in the environmental impact of the materials through their life cycles, from extraction through end use. No word on whether a comparison between steel and kryptonite is planned.

Working in UMR's Electromagnetic Compatibility Lab, David Pommerenke and two Ph.D. students have created a new scanning system that can identify areas on printed circuit boards and integrated circuits that are susceptible to electromagnetic interference. The system uses four components: a three-dimensional positioner; high-voltage pulse generators; electrostatic discharge pulse injection probes; and feedback and control software.

The researchers discovered that electrostatic discharge-induced electromagnetic interference can affect a system even on signal lines that carry slow digital signals such as status lines. Printed circuit board designers usually use short traces to carry high-frequency signals such as clocks and serial data streams, but they may use longer runs for slowly changing signals. Unfortunately, the longer the trace, the better it acts as a receiving antenna for stray electromagnetic interference.

From Test & Measurement World.

Fortunately, the UMR Solar House Team builds its houses in easy-to-take-apart sections (well, relatively easy). Here, part of the house built for the 2002 Solar Decathlon awaits a transitioning to a new, permanent foundation. Soon, the 2005 house will be moved out of storage to its new home next door to the 2002 house on UMR property. The vision is to create a solar village of sorts. In this village of the future, high utility bills and the threat of 100 degree temperatures causing blackouts will be worries of the past. Using the knowledge acquired from previous builds, UMR will begin construction of a brand new solar house this fall on the exact spot vacated by the house pictured above.

This section of the 2002 house (above) is in the process of being relocated to a new foundation nearby, where it will be reunited with the rest of itself.

The foundation in the foreground above has been prepared for the 2002 house. Eventually, there will be four houses, each built uniquely for Solar Decathlon competitions, in UMR's solar village. Solar Decathlons are held every two to three years in Washington D.C.

Sometimes, despite what Kermit says, being green is too easy. At least that appears to be the case for the lake at Ber Juan Park in Rolla.

Three UMR graduate students recently collected water samples in order to determine what's causing green slime to cover the water. Their finding?

The lake is eutrophic. In essence, this means that the water is overly rich in mineral and organic nutrients, specifically phosphorus and nitrogen, that promote plant life and especially algae growth. ... “This is not a unique problem,” Joel Burken said. As long as the lake is getting excessive nutrients, said Burken, this sort of growth is a common, and even likely, thing to occur.

From the Rolla Daily News.