Author Archive

Iron Man, 3-D Printing and the Responsibility of Power

Monday, May 13th, 2013 | Tags: , ,

If you’ve seen Iron Man 3, you know that – SPOILER ALERT!!!! – billionaire inventor Tony Stark reveals dozens of specialized Iron Man power suits. As fantastic as the suits are, the technology Stark likely uses to make them is not far removed from reality – and neither are the big questions that such technology

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New Mechanism Converts Natural Gas to Energy Faster, Captures CO2

Tuesday, May 7th, 2013 | Tags: , , ,

Chemical engineering researchers have identified a new mechanism to convert natural gas into energy up to 70 times faster, while effectively capturing the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2). “This could make power generation from natural gas both cleaner and more efficient,” says Fanxing Li, co-author of a paper on the research and an assistant professor

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Iron Man, Reverse Engineering and the Future of Materials Science

Wednesday, April 24th, 2013 | Tags: , ,

Iron Man 3 isn’t out yet, but the first two movies (and decades of Iron Man comics) raise some interesting questions about how scientists can create and utilize new materials – like the energy source for Iron Man’s suit. For those who have been shut off from pop culture, here’s a recap of the first

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New Flu Review 2: How do you measure lethality?

Thursday, April 11th, 2013 | Tags: , ,

Editor’s Note: You may hear about fatality rates or percentages when media report on new and dangerous flu strains, and often times the reports are conflicting. In this post, Barrett Slenning, an epidemiologist at NC State, explains how these fatality rates are calculated, and why the numbers may fluctuate. A previous post on H7N9 flu

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The Heat Is On To Understand Thermal Transport between Materials

Monday, March 18th, 2013 | Tags: , , ,

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Losego, a research assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State. Losego recently co-authored a News and Views article about nanoscale heat flow in Nature Materials with David Cahill of the University of Illinois. The basics of heat flow have long been overlooked, but

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