A recent study by professors Mark Changizi and Marc Destefano was featured by the Discovery Channel program Daily Planet, and received a glowing endorsement from show co-host Jay Ingram:
“I love this idea. It connects two things you’d never think of connecting and that makes it cool - and even awesome.”
Sadly, the site does not allow its videos to be embedded elsewhere, so the best I can do is give you the link:
Click on this image to see the video clip
After the short commercial, scroll ahead to 7 min 30 sec into the video for the segment on Changizi and Destefano’s work.
Professors George Xu and Suvranu De have been working together for some time, pairing their talent toward the shared goal of making fake medical patients more real.
There’s an easy way to explain the complex work they do: People breathe, and when we breathe our internal organs shift around a bit. Xu and De want to program a computer to accurately and reliably recreate this process.
This organ movement is a huge disadvantage for doctors who are administering radiation treatment to patients suffering from different types of cancerous tumors. Conventional medical equipment can be carefully calibrated to focus radiation on a specific spot inside the body, but the technology is not yet robust enough to refine its movements to account for the shifting of internal organs as a patient breathes.
Think of it this way. While it’s fairly easy to thread a needle, imagine trying to thread a needle that is being held by someone else – and that person has a shaky hand. Now imagine threading that needle could be a life-or-death situation.
I ran into professor Henry Scarton not long ago at the Rensselaer Union, and he spilled the beans about an exciting new research project his group is undertaking: learning to listen through walls.
Sure, there are probably countless potential espionage and intrigue applications for such a device, but the technology is far more Geordi La Forge than James Bond.
Source: National Atomic Museum
Meet Simon. The 11,000 lb nuclear bomb was detonated amongst the sand and rocky crags of the Nevada desert the morning of April 25, 1953. Thirty-six hours later and 2,300 miles away, rain poured from the sky onto our humble city, Troy, NY. Forty-eight hours later the Geiger counters in the lab of Rensselaer chemistry professor Herbert Clark were crackling away at surprising levels. The counters closest to the outside wall picked up background radiation levels three times greater than the normal rate of 30 counts/min.
Clark and his students, intrigued by the sudden change, went to work outside.
We welcome the future innovators of Rensselaer to The Approach! Above, many of the freshman class take that timeless walk down the steps of our namesake just hours before they dove into thier first classes.
We look forward to their coming achievements and of course seeing some of their smiling mugs on future Approach posts.
Professor Ravi Kane provided some excellent insight during their convocation several nights after their stroll that it seems fit to share with all Rensselaer researchers both budding and fully-entrenched: “As you sit here in Troy, the supposed home of Uncle Sam, just remember: Uncle Sam actually does need you.”
Welcome Class of 2013!
The successful launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on Friday means an important little piece of Rensselaer is floating in orbit above the earth.
The Constrained Vapor Bubble project, led by ChemE professors Joel Plawsky and Peter Wayner, is now safely in space and slated for installation in the International Space Station. You can see the project patch above. The experimental CVB heat transfer system, which will be tested board the ISS over the next few years, is ideal for space applications because it has no moving parts and, as a result, should work for a gazillion hours without the need for repair or replacement. You can read all about the CVB here.
Tarek Abdoun and his wife, Nevin
We asked Tarek Abdoun, the Iovino ’73 Professor in Civil Engineering at Rensselaer, about his research:
Your research involves geotechnical engineering and earthquakes. How did you first become interested in these topics?
During my final year in college, my city – Cairo, Egypt – was hit by an earthquake which caused a lot of devastation. I volunteered to help assess the damage caused by the earthquake. After seeing firsthand how earthquakes can be so destructive I decided to dedicate my research efforts to improving the resilience of our infrastructure against natural hazards.
Will science ever allow us to predict or prevent earthquakes?
Prediction might be difficult in the near future but our goal is to minimize the fatalities and economical losses caused by earthquakes
Every day at this time of year the apply named sunflower moves its massive flowers from east to west, following the movement of the sun across in the sky. The parallel promenade is the flower’s effort to capture as much energy-giving sunlight as possible - a trait known as heliotropism.
Researchers within the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE) are continuing work on a project that will literally change the entire facade of a building into a built heliotropic organism. Known as the Integrated Concentrating Solar Facade System, it is an entirely new and exceptionally beautiful system to harness the energy and heat of the sun.
Anyone who has ever suffered a flat tire while on the way to an important family gathering, or had their flight delayed, or had babysitter cancel at the last minute knows this all too well: time is money.
This old adage is amplified to an incredible degree in the world of service and manufacturing. Many automated production lines run for 16 or 24 hours a day, and any unplanned interruptions can results in serious overhead costs for the company. Not only do they have to pay someone to fix the problem and keep an expensive inventory of spare parts, they usually have to continue paying everyone else to wait around while the issue is resolved – and then pay those employees overtime to stay longer and help make up for lost time. Then things may lag for a while, schedules fall behind while everyone plays catch-up, and customers begin to grumble. The situation can spiral downwards quickly.
If only we had some sort of sixth sense or crystal ball to let us know ahead of time before things went awry.
That’s exactly the problem Professor Jennifer Ryan is trying to help solve. Her augury of choice, however, is nothing as arcane as a crystal ball – it’s just good decision engineering.