Tech Topics - Winter 2008 - (Page 19)

THE HILL Engineering a Better World Woodruff lecturer pushes for more aid to developing countries By Van Jensen O ver the past century, engineers have helped to vastly improve the quality of life and answered several critical problems facing humanity. But those improvements have benefited almost only Western countries — with a fraction of the world’s population — while developing countries have continued to struggle, said Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers Without Borders and an engineering professor at the University of Colorado, at the annual distinguished lecture of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Amadei urged the large crowd of engineering students and their professors to look beyond their borders and seek opportunities to greatly help struggling people. “As engineers, it is an obligation, not an option,” he said. “What we did for the Western world is what we need to do now for the developing world.” Amadei said he was once only focused on engi- ”As engineers, it is an obligation, not an option. What we did for the Western world is what we need to do now for the developing world.” neering massive, financially rewarding projects. Then, in 2000, he was traveling in Central America and was invited to visit a poor Mayan village in Belize. The children of the village couldn’t go to school because they had to spend most of the day hiking to a nearby stream and hauling back water for the villagers to use. Amadei felt an immediate need to engineer a solution to their lack of running water. His first instinct was to bring in a pump to pull water from the stream, but he realized there was no money for gasoline and no electricity. Instead, he and a group of students created a system that relied on the current to push water up a pipe to the village. Once they completed the project, Amadei noticed the students had become engaged in a way they hadn’t been before. “I asked why, and they said they wanted something meaningful,” he said. After that revelation, Amadei went back to Colorado and started Engineers Without Borders, which looks around the world to help populations ERIC TURNER Bernard Amadei, founder of Engineers Without Borders, encourages “engineering with a human face.” struggling with issues such as sanitation and lack of clean water. He pointed out that one doesn’t need to scour the globe to find people struggling. Engineers Without Borders has been active in helping a Native American community in Montana and in finding answers to the plight of poor children in American inner cities, which he called “a disaster.” Amadei cited UNICEF figures that 29,000 children die every day from hunger and told the story of one village he visited where a woman carrying a child near death approached him and begged for him to help. “This is engineering with a human face,” he said, “engineering that can change a life.” MEDIA Gatekeeping in the Internet Age Technology has profoundly affected political discourse, according to a lecture by a Georgia Tech public policy professor. Susan Herbst, who also is the executive vice chancellor of the University System of Georgia, delivered a lecture on media and American democracy on campus in September. “Before the Internet, you read a text, you read a newspaper article, you saw a television advertisement or a news program and it was whole and it was contained,” she said. “Now you have these links within media content on the Internet that enable you to search and learn a tremendous amount through sheer serendipity, depending on whether you click the links or not. This is a huge deal because your political cognition is wide open to a wealth of unsystematically presented information. “There’s no question that technology alters the political space,” she said. “When we just had plain TV, we theorized that people pushed back to media content that they questioned, that they resisted it at times in their heads. Now, with the Internet and their ability to react and to respond and to blog and to Twitter, pushing back to Internet content is welcome, there’s a place for it.” But with a rise in blogs has come a fall in gatekeeping. “The prestigious gatekeepers of truth still exist … but they are overwhelmed by the number of sites by regular people who are not trained as journalists.” Herbst said newspapers “have succumbed to this. They have the real reporters, and those people put content on their Web sites, but The New York Times enables blogging and input from the rest of us right on their site. Who would have thought a hundred years ago that The New York Times would … have your opinion connected with their publication on a Web site? It’s astounding how things have changed and how much reporters and editors have … realized how tenuous their grip on gatekeeping is.” RESEARCH Material Mimics Gecko Grip Scientists have long been interested in the ability of gecko lizards to scurry up walls and cling to ceilings by their toes. The creatures owe this ability to microscopic branched elastic hairs in their toes that take advantage of atomic-scale attractive forces to grip surfaces and support surprisingly heavy loads. In a paper published in Science in October, researchers from Georgia Tech, the University of Dayton, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the University of Akron described an improved carbon-nanotube-based material that for the first time creates directionally varied adhesive force. With a gripping ability nearly three times the previous record — and 10 times better than a real gecko at resisting perpendicular shear forces — the new carbon-nanotube array could give artificial gecko feet the ability to tightly grip vertical surfaces while being easily lifted off when desired. Beyond the ability to walk on walls, the material could have many technological applications, including connecting electronic devices and substituting for conventional adhesives in the dry vacuum of space. The key to the new material is the use of rationally designed multi-walled carbon-nanotubes formed into arrays with “curly entangled tops,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. The tops, which Wang compared to spaghetti or a jungle of vines, mimic the hierarchical structure of real gecko feet. Full text at: http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=2192&ga=1. TechTopics | Winter 2008 19 http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=2192&ga=1 http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=2192&ga=1

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Tech Topics - Winter 2008 Contents Letters Buzz Around Town Alumni House Rockin’ Good Time State of the Institute The Hill Presidential Search Going Airborne Student Life An Architect’s Eyes Weight Coach Robot Burdell & Friends Ramblin’ Roll Rural Readers Leading Ladies Yellow Jackets Beyond His Years Leading Change Real World

Tech Topics - Winter 2008

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