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Category: engineering – Page 134

New Research Finds Potential Mechanism Linking Autism and Intestinal Inflammation

Infection during pregnancy with elevated levels of the cytokine IL-17a may yield microbiome alterations that prime offspring for aberrant immune responses, mouse study suggests.

Though many people with autism spectrum disorders also experience unusual gastrointestinal inflammation, scientists have not established how those conditions might be linked. Now MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.

MIT Physicists Use Fundamental Atomic Property To Turn Matter Invisible

Atom ’s electrons are arranged in energy shells. Like concertgoers in an arena, each electron occupies a single chair and cannot drop to a lower tier if all its chairs are occupied. This fundamental property of atomic physics is known as the Pauli exclusion principle, and it explains the shell structure of atoms, the diversity of the periodic table of elements, and the stability of the material universe.

Now, MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.

Using aluminum and water to make clean hydrogen fuel — when and where it’s needed

“If we’re going to use scrap aluminum for hydrogen generation in a practical application, we need to be able to better predict what hydrogen generation characteristics we’re going to observe from the aluminum-water reaction,” says Laureen Meroueh PhD ’20, who earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering.

Since the fundamental steps in the reaction aren’t well understood, it’s been hard to predict the rate and volume at which hydrogen forms from scrap aluminum, which can contain varying types and concentrations of alloying elements. So Hart, Meroueh, and Thomas W. Eagar, a professor of materials engineering and engineering management in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, decided to examine — in a systematic fashion — the impacts of those alloying elements on the aluminum-water reaction and on a promising technique for preventing the formation of the interfering oxide layer.

To prepare, they had experts at Novelis Inc. fabricate samples of pure aluminum and of specific aluminum alloys made of commercially pure aluminum combined with either 0.6 percent silicon (by weight), 1 percent magnesium, or both — compositions that are typical of scrap aluminum from a variety of sources. Using those samples, the MIT researchers performed a series of tests to explore different aspects of the aluminum-water reaction.

DARPA Successfully Transitions Synthetic Biomanufacturing Technologies to Support National Security Objectives

Launched in 2010, DARPA’s Living Foundries program aimed to enable adaptable, scalable, and on-demand production of critical, high-value molecules by programming the fundamental metabolic processes of biological systems to generate a vast number of complex molecules. These molecules were often prohibitively expensive, unable to be domestically sourced, and/or impossible to manufacture using traditional synthetic chemistry approaches. As a proof of concept, DARPA intended to produce 1,000 molecules and material precursors spanning a wide range of defense-relevant applications including industrial chemicals, fuels, coatings, and adhesives.

Divided into two parts – Advanced Tools and Capabilities for Generalizable Platforms (ATCG) and 1,000 Molecules – the Living Foundries program succeeded not only in meeting its programmatic goals of producing 1,000 molecules as a proof-of-concept, but pivoted in 2019 to expand program objectives to working with military mission partners to test molecules for military applications. The performer teams collectively have produced over 1,630 molecules and materials to-date, and more importantly, DARPA is transitioning a subset of these technologies to five military research teams from Army, Navy, and Air Force labs who partnered with the agency on testing and evaluation over the course of the program.

“Biologically-produced molecules offer orders-of-magnitude greater diversity in chemical functionality compared to traditional approaches, enabling scientists to produce new bioreachable molecules faster than ever before,” noted Dr. Anne Cheever, Living Foundries program manager. “Through Living Foundries, DARPA has transformed synthetic biomanufacturing into a predictable engineering practice supportive of a broad range of national security objectives.”

Rolls-Royce Reached the 1-MW Milestone With Its Hybrid-Electric Powertrain

Rolls-Royce’s new 2.5-megawatt hybrid-electric propulsion system delivered more than a megawatt of power only a few weeks after its first tests, a press statement reveals.

The iconic British engineering firm is developing the Power Generation System 1 (PGS1) demonstrator powertrain to test the technology for clean aircraft of the future.

Transforming materials with light: Study could lead to ultrafast light-based computers and more

Imagine windows that can easily transform into mirrors, or super high-speed computers that run not on electrons but light. These are just some of the potential applications that could one day emerge from optical engineering, the practice of using lasers to rapidly and temporarily change the properties of materials.

“These tools could let you transform the electronic properties of materials at the flick of a switch,” says Caltech Professor of Physics David Hsieh. “But the technologies have been limited by the problem of the lasers creating too much heat in the materials.”

In a new study in Nature, Hsieh and his team, including lead author and graduate student Junyi Shan, report success at using lasers to dramatically sculpt the properties of materials without the production of any excess damaging heat.