Engineering the Future

NSF Invests $10 Million in
New Engineering Research Centers
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has invested $10 million to fund the first year of new Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) in Georgia, Hawaii, Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia. The five new centers are pioneering fields such as tissue engineering, computer assisted surgery, computer modeling and visualization of industrial materials, power electronics and marine bioproducts. "As research expands knowledge, the perceived boundaries between the classic disciplines of engineering and science are beginning to blur," said Eugene Wong, NSF assistant director for engineering. "The Engineering Research Centers not only expand the frontiers of engineering technology, they prepare the next generation of engineering leaders."    More...

NSF Awards Minority Graduate Education Grants
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is awarding eight universities nearly $2.5-million each to significantly increase the number of African American, Hispanic and Native American students receiving doctoral degrees in the sciences, mathematics and engineering (SME). These institutions are the first to participate in five-year cooperative agreements with NSF in its newly established Minority Graduate Education (MGE) program.
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Scientists Propose Layered Model of Earth's Inner Core
Earth's inner core is not a uniform iron crystal, but is instead composed of two distinct layers, according to researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Seismologists Xiaodong Song from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Don Helmberger of the California Institute of Technology used seismic data from earthquakes to infer that the inner core has two distinct parts: a spherical lower part surrounded by a thin, uneven upper layer of different material properties. These findings are likely to affect the current model of how the earth, and its magnetic field, formed.    More...

Researcher Links Internet Behavior
with Laws of Physics
The Internet has a reputation as a wild and woolly electronic frontier where anything goes and no one plays by the rules, because there are no rules. Yet, underlying patterns of Internet use are driven by well-structured rules of social and physical interaction that can be modeled mathematically, and may even point the way to developing more user-friendly Web sites and search mechanisms, according to NSF-funded researcher Bernardo A. Huberman, a consulting professor of physics at Stanford University and a Research Fellow at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Huberman's research indicates that while moving through a Web site with a mouse seems random, the behavior actually can be plotted and predicted, conforming to laws of physics that were derived in the 1920's on apparent random movements of sub-atomic particles. More...