Design and Construction

The rapid engineering innovation in the field of 3D printing has drawn plenty of attention in the past few years, and a good deal of speculation as to how far the technology could go. But what has often gotten less press are the engineering tools that companies and researchers use to produce the models that these new printers then bring into being.

Despite strong support from the government, the engineering innovations needed to bring electric vehicles into the mainstream have proven challenging to say the least. But Green Car Reports notes that Palo Alto, California-based Tesla Motors seems to have overcome some of the biggest hurdles keeping these cars out of the market after early numbers show the automaker beat out its biggest German rivals in the first quarter of the year.

On Friday, May 10, construction workers in New York City finally completed the new tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps.

Another in a long line of innovative engineering solutions developed for the purposes of space travel, but finding uses right here on Earth, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has found a way to produce steel without the associated carbon emissions.

The drive to adopt solar power has been growing stronger than ever in recent years, but a great deal of engineering research still needs to be done to make the technology broadly competitive with fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. A team at the University of Utah recently published its research on one new option that has emerged in the past few years, using something as simple as a household microwave to manufacture highly efficient semiconductors for use in solar cells.

At 3 in the morning of May 2, Pakpong Chirarattananon, graduate student at Harvard University, emailed a video to his advisor and fellow researchers that displayed a successful outcome to years of cooperative engineering research. The video showed a robotic insect half the size of a paperclip fly along a predetermined route. The artificial insect weighed less than a 10th of a gram and flew using paper thin wings that beat 120 times per second.

Sometimes new engineering innovations are born of a sudden inspiration, a flash of brilliance that opens up new opportunities. Other times engineering research is a steady slog through incremental progress. But just as often the key is looking at previous examples and figuring out where things went wrong.

Since at least 1966 when the original Star Trek began airing, Americans have at least known that antimatter exists. But despite decades of engineering innovations and advanced physics research, the substance is still far from powering human space travel and, in fact, scientists still know surprisingly little about these particles. Among these frustrating gaps in general knowledge - does antimatter fall up or down?

Effective application of the piezoelectric effect found in certain crystals could allow engineering researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology to create a highly sensitive new form of tactile sensor.

A new heating system being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the automaker Ford could bring a critical engineering innovation to the market for electric vehicles, according to MIT's Technology Review.