“Over the next year-and-a-half we will be designing, building, and testing a 1,200-square foot Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) that is carbon-neutral, resilient, affordable, water- and energy-efficient, and of course attractive and comfortable,” says the website for Team M.A.D.E.-OC — “Modular Affordable Dwellings for the Environment” — which pairs up Orange Coast College and UCI’s School of Engineering.
UC Irvine researchers created a free smartphone app, dubbed TrackCOVID, which develops an anonymous graph of interactions by pooling user data every time an individual gathers with others or goes to a public place. App users can log their interactions and "checkpoints", or places visited, and the app anonymously links users' interactions as they congregate in the same places over time.
“We continue to work with SoCalGas on transforming several parts of its gas system for introducing some percentage of hydrogen initially and transforming it for eventually carrying all hydrogen,” said Jack Brouwer, UCI engineering professor and hydrogen [National] Fuel Cell Research [Center] director. UCI’s work with Sempra’s SoCalGas utility involves determining what impacts hydrogen-natural gas blends would have on various gas-fired appliances and end-uses.
Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at UC Irvine’s medical school and a contributor to the Bridge Ventilator Consortium ventilator project, described the use-case for that project as “only in situations where you don't have any ventilators available and the patient needs a ventilator.” In collaboration with the consortium, Virgin Orbit has designed a ventilator of the “automating-a-manual-resuscitator” variety. It’s nowhere near as complex as a critical care ventilator.
Newsha Ajami, [UCI alumna, Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering and] chief development officer for research at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, adds that it’s especially important to capture stormwater as droughts are becoming more common. “Water, if we protect it as soon as it hits the ground and keep it clean, we can actually reuse it and repurpose it in various ways, especially during the wet years that we get,” Ajami says.
“Always when there is a hurricane, you have compounding effects of ocean flooding — surge — and terrestrial flooding,” said Amir AghaKouchak, an associate professor of hydrology and remote sensing at the University of California at Irvine.
The modular unit was designed and built by a group of 30 students from UC Irvine and Orange Coast College as part of the inaugural Orange County Sustainability Decathlon. The competition brought together college students to not only get hands-on architecture experience, but to do so with affordability and sustainability in mind. … “The ADU gifted from UCI and OCC is going to give us the ability to expand our program. Currently with just the home that we have, we can serve up to nine individuals, both male and female,” Alfa Hernandez, program director at HIS-OC, said.
Johns Hopkins University microbiologist Jocelyne DiRuggiero wanted to find out how it’s possible for a microbe to carry out photosynthesis in an environment where there is essentially no water available. So she collaborated with University of California, Irvine, materials scientist David Kisailus, who probed the biogeochemical relationship between microbe and rock using a battery of analytical tools usually reserved for studying nonliving materials.
Iryna Zenyuk, Ph.D., is a researcher, associate professor of [chemical] and biomolecular engineering, and associate director of the University of California, Irvine National Fuel Cell Research Center. … Dr. Zenyuk also sees a major shift toward fuel cells for trucks. “For long-haul truck drivers and their employers, time and every pound of payload is money,” she said. “Heavy-duty trucks are virtually impossible to decarbonize with batteries.
That kind of contamination would make contact with the water dangerous, said Sunny Jiang, professor and chair of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
Deadline: N/A
Company: Resonant Inc.
Products: RF filters for cellular phone market
Locations: Santa Barbara and San Francisco Bay Area
Qualifications needed: MSc.
Contact: Sohrab Samadian, Vice President of Engineering, ssamadian@resonant.com
“This emerging fusion of the AI and engineering fields represents a profound opportunity to make breakthrough research advances as well as to address some of the most pressing challenges facing society today,” said Pramod Khargonekar, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and vice chancellor for research at the University of California, Irvine, and chair of the visioning event.
“Fire has made us civilized, but we still don’t understand it fully,” said Tirtha Banerjee, [UCI engineering assistant professor] …. “Scientists have been “just completely caught off guard about how fast things are changing,” said James T. Randerson, [UCI Chancellor’s Professor, Earth system science]. … Banerjee and his team of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers flew their drone repeatedly over the area, mapping it …..
The Hazel Crow Opportunity Fund supports expenses for WICS members to participate in conferences that focus on computer sciences, such as the annual Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Nationwide, women earned only 18 percent of the bachelor's degrees awarded in computer science in 2010, according to the National Science Foundation. That's less than half the proportion in 1985, when 37 percent of those degrees went to women.
However, there’s no guarantee that an engineered cell will load the desired cargo into its vesicles. “The cells decide what to encapsulate,” says Young Kwon, a biomedical and materials scientist at the University of California, Irvine. Nguyen’s team is studying how cells make those decisions, to find ways to ramp up exosome loading with artificial cargo. Researchers have identified strands of code common in natural exosomal RNAs that probably play a part in packaging the molecules.
But even before that, [Microsoft] has been exploring ways to use fuel cells, beginning to explore the technology in 2013 with the National Fuel Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine, where they tested the idea of powering racks of servers with solid oxide fuel cells, or SOFCs, which are fueled by natural gas. Read More
A disappearing California beach is partly behind the weekslong closure of one of Amtrak's busiest routes in the latest example of how changing weather patterns and eroding shorelines pose a threat to the state's coastal rail corridor. … “That stretch of the coast has really lost a significant amount of sand over the last decade or two,” said Brett Sanders, professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of California, Irvine.
One promising solution is hydrogen storage, and the University of California, Irvine just launched the first such project in the United States, paving the way for other universities or municipalities to do the same.
Deadline: N/A
