February 2008 Issue
world watch
Space Age Idea Lands in New Mexico
BY GAIL HELGASON
Freelance Writer
Area 51, move over. Billed as the world’s first commercial spaceport, a Virgin Galactic scheme aims to evoke the idea of space travel while blending into the sparse New Mexico desert.
Civil Engineering (Reston, Va.) reports that the subsidiary of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group plans a prime site for commercial flights into suborbital space. The design will have a “low-lying organic shape” that “resembles a rise in the landscape.”
The structure, slated for a site about 70 kilometres north of Las Cruces, will strive to convey “the thrill of space travel” — but with minimal impact on the environment. So says the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, which the state created to oversee the spaceport’s development.
A Farewell to Water Filters?
A water filtration system that never requires filter media replacement is now
available in North America. Nihon Genryo Co. launched its Saito tank at the annual
Water
Chemical Engineering (New York) reports that the granular system — a technology well established in Japan — is estimated to pay for itself in three to five years. Traditional systems require the recycling and disposing of filter media, and use more than twice the volume of water for backwashing than the Saito tank does, says company president Yasuhiro Saito.
Look out, Mars — Here We Come
NASA hopes to have a human on Mars by 2037, Civil Engineering reports. The International
Space Station, to be completed in 2010, would provide the base humans would travel
from, says NASA administrator Michael Griffin.
Way to Go, Wisconsin
The University of Wisconsin-Madison now ranks second among all 600 research universities
in the United States, when rated by annual dollar amounts put towards science
and engineering research. Wisconsin’s Capital Times reports that the expenditures
totaled $832 million in 2006.
According to the National Science Foundation, the university trails only Johns Hopkins University. The top five also included, in order, the University of California-Los Angeles, the University of Michigan (combined campuses) and the University of California-San Francisco.
Concrete Solutions
Planet Earth’s humans produce nearly three tons of concrete a year — for
each one of them. It’s a statistic that’s not exactly surprising,
says a story in Engineering News-Record (New York).
Concrete is, after all, the world’s most widely manufactured building material.
The Cement Sustainability Initiative, an international group of manufacturers, notes that concrete accounts for five per cent of human-caused carbon dioxide in the world.
Cement producers have, however, made significant progress in their first goal of reducing energy use by 20 per cent by 2020. In fact they’re more than half way there, at the 12 per cent mark.
Down Under Technology Drives Communications Underground
How do you provide reliable and durable voice and data communications for underground
mining systems? It’s a question that has long stymied experts and industry.
But a recent advanced connection technology may signal a breakthrough, suggests
Mining Engineering (Littleton, Colo.). Mine Site Technologies, headquartered
in Sydney, Australia, has developed a platform product line for networks that
sends a mine’s Ethernet capabilities underground.
The resulting wireless connectivity could end up addressing some of the challenges
of underground data communications, likely through the use of hybrid connector
cables.
Flit and Swivel
Better than Crane and Crawl
American engineers are applying the latest biomechanical technology to the struggle
against the pinched neck and slipped disc, thanks to a partnership of Honda and
Ohio State University’s Center for Occupational Health in Automotive Manufacturing.
Forbes (New York) reports that the company’s seven-year-old partnership with the university is “the latest in a safety push by manufacturers anxious over liability claims and rising healthcare costs.”
At the university, students are using a software program that can chart the strain and position of back muscles on sensor-wearing human subjects. It also models the shear stress on spinal discs for each repetition.
The article notes that the partnership has spawned numerous manufacturing improvements — among them a super chair, in which workers who “once craned and crawled” now “flit and swivel” in and out of SUVs to install overhead lamps, seat belts and air bags.