Lifeboat Foundation

By many accounts, the Tesla Model 3 is a great car. Sure, it’s needed some work on the body and on fit and finish, but there’s lots of cool engineering behind Tesla’s highest volume offering, including the “Superbottle,” an awesome packaging solution for the cooling system that contains a fun little easter egg.

Last week, I stopped by Munro and Associates, the fascinating company that tears cars apart to find out exactly how they’re built. While there, manufacturing experts showed me the Tesla Model 3’s bizarre-looking coolant bottle, which features a cape-wearing bottle as part of the mold:

Also on the bottle is the text “Superbottle”:

Continue reading “The Tesla Model 3 ‘Superbottle’ Easter Egg Is a Fascinating Packaging Solution” »

In Tutorials

Tolerance and fit are essential concepts for any engineer designing mechanical assemblies.

Accounting for tolerances ultimately optimizes both the prototyping and production processes, reducing the material cost of iteration, lowering post-processing time, and mitigating the risk of accidentally broken parts.

At Intel’s recent Architecture Day, Raja Koduri, Intel’s senior vice president of Core and Visual Computing, outlined a strategic shift for the company’s design and engineering model. This shift combines a series of foundational building blocks that leverage a world-class portfolio of technologies and intellectual property (IP) within the company.

Architecture Day Fact Sheet: New Intel Architectures and Technologies Target Expanded Market Opportunities

This approach is designed to allow Intel to drive an accelerated pace of innovation and leadership, and will be anchored across six strategic pillars:

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The promise of quantum computing brings with it some mind-blowing potential, but it also carries a new set of risks, scientists are warning.

Specifically, the enormous power of the tech could be used to crack the best cyber security we currently have in place.

A new report on the “progress and prospects” of quantum computing put together by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in the US says that work should start now on putting together algorithms to beat the bad guys.

Continue reading “We Need to Prepare For Quantum Attacks Now, Top US Scientists Warn” »

A new way to make arrays of nanofibers that gets its inspiration from polar bear fur, lotus leaves, and gecko feet could lead to coatings that are sticky, repellant, insulating, or light emitting.

“This is so removed from anything I’ve ever seen that I would have thought it was impossible,” says Joerg Lahann, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan and senior author of the paper, which appears in Science.

Polar bear hairs are structured to let light in while keeping heat from escaping. Water-repelling lotus leaves are coated with arrays of microscopic waxy tubules. And the nanoscale hairs on the bottoms of gravity-defying gecko feet get so close to other surfaces that atomic forces of attraction come into play.

Virginia Tech announced Thursday it will receive a record $50 million gift to support biomedical research, a landmark donation for the public university that will expand the influence of its academic health center in Roanoke.

The gift comes from the Horace G. Fralin Charitable Trust and from Heywood and Cynthia Fralin. It is twice as large as the previous record, a $25 million donation from Alice and Bill Goodwin for an engineering building that opened in 2014 on the university’s main campus in Blacksburg.

The new funding will help the university recruit and retain researchers, a spokesman said. A biomedical research institute will be named for the Fralin family and based within the Virginia Tech Carilion Academic Health Center.

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The discovery by researchers at the University of Leeds marks a major breakthrough which has eluded material scientists for more than 30 years.

The ‘auxetic’ stretching property, which is found in human tendons and cat skin, had only been recreated using conventional materials.

Continue reading “Scientists create ‘liquid crystal’ that gets THICKER when stretched” »

Antoine Henri Becquerel (born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France), known as Henri Becquerel, was a French physicist who discovered radioactivity, a process in which an atomic nucleus emits particles because it is unstable. He won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre and Marie Curie, the latter of whom was Becquerel’s graduate student. The SI unit for radioactivity called the becquerel (or Bq), which measures the amount of ionizing radiation that is released when an atom experiences radioactive decay, is also named after Becquerel.

Becquerel was born December 15, 1852 in Paris, France, to Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel and Aurelie Quenard. At an early age, Becquerel attended the preparatory school Lycée Louis-le-Grand, located in Paris. In 1872, Becquerel began attending the École Polytechnique and in 1874 the École des Ponts et Chaussées (Bridges and Highways School), where he studied civil engineering.

Critics say that geoengineering efforts are Band-Aid solutions that treat the symptoms of climate change instead of the cause: global carbon emissions. Jim Thomas, the co-executive director of an environmental advocacy organization called the ETC Group, told Nature that he fears the Harvard project could push the concept of geoengineering into the mainstream.

But advocates say that anything that could buy some extra time in the face of looming climate catastrophe is worth exploring.

“I’m studying a chemical substance,” Harvard researcher Zhen Dai told Nature. “It’s not like it’s a nuclear bomb.”