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The Mantis Shrimp Inspires a New Material—Made by Bacteria
So when a mantis shrimp’s hammer smashes into a thumb or a clam or a crab’s face, any crack in its structure will propagate in a twist pattern, dissipating the energy throughout the material. … Neat, said engineers at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Irvine, who’ve invented a clever kind of material based on the mantis shrimp’s clobber-sticks. … It’s a twist within a twist: They’ve been able to get minerals to grow within a 3D-printed shrimp-inspired Bouligand structure with the help of bacteria, of all things.
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Today’s Headlines: California
A major flood would hit Los Angeles Black communities disproportionately hard. A study from UC Irvine researchers does not predict when the next 100-year flood will occur.
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Titanium golf club blamed for Orange County brush fire
That isn't a surprise to James Earthman, a UC Irvine chemical engineering and materials science professor who did a study in 2014. ... "With stainless steel we never saw any sparks," Earthman said. "When we tested a titanium club, every time we hit a rock with a titanium there were a lot of sparks."
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The High-Stakes Race to Build More Ventilators
Along the way, [Kevin] Zagorski and his colleagues took direction from the Bridge Ventilator Consortium, an ad hoc group of doctors and engineers based at UC Irvine and the University of Texas Austin. The consortium coined the term “bridge ventilator,” for a simple device with fewer capabilities than the more complex machines typically used in hospitals, but good enough for many patients with relatively mild issues, including some Covid-19 patients. “Not everyone needs the Cadillac,” says Govind Rajan, an anesthesiologist at the UC Irvine Medical Center.
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The List – Charitable Gifts of 2023
2023 single gift amounts
Samueli Foundation – $50,000,000
Gift will launch “Engineering+” research institutes on health, society and the environment at the Henry Samueli School of Engineering; create the Office of Inreach.Stacey Nicholas – $5,000,000
Gift will establish the Women and Engineering Program, supporting the recruitment, retention and graduation of students within the Henry Samueli School of Engineering -
The Western United States Is a Hotspot for Snow Droughts
“The common ways to measure droughts are through precipitation, soil moisture and runoff,” says Laurie S. Huning, an environmental engineer at the University of California, Irvine. Her most recent work adds another dimension to that by looking at water stored in snowpack. Huning is the co-author of a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, with U.C.
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Turning CO2 solid could allow underground burial
“Certain types of rocks, such as those containing basalt, are rich in divalent metal cations that naturally convert CO2 into stable metal carbonate matter,” says co-lead author M.J. Abdolhosseini Qomi, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Irvine.
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Team designs carbon nanostructure stronger than diamonds
"Previous beam-based designs, while of great interest, had not been so efficient in terms of mechanical properties," said corresponding author Jens Bauer, a UCI researcher in mechanical & aerospace engineering. "This new class of plate-nanolattices that we've created is dramatically stronger and stiffer than the best beam-nanolattices." Read More
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The Fingerprints on Chile’s Fires and California Floods: El Niño and Warming
Brett F. Sanders, an engineering professor at the University of California, Irvine, who focuses on flood management, said atmospheric river events like the one hitting the state now have been predicted by climate models and are presenting urban planners with new challenges. “The mentality of the past was that we could control floods, and contain where flooding happened. And outside of that, communities and businesses and residents could kind of go about what they do, and not think about floods,” Dr. Sanders said.
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This robotic exoskeleton could help prevent falls in the elderly
The words “robotic exoskeleton” probably bring to mind futuristic soldiers and sci-fi flicks like Aliens, Iron Man, or The Wrong Trousers.
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The Blue Box Is An Award-Winning Affordable Home-Testing Kit For Breast Cancer
Judit Giró Benet, a 23-year-old Spanish engineer, invented a new way to detect breast cancer from the comforts of home using just a urine sample.
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Thousands of opportunities
Elizabeth Chiu first got interested in mechanical engineering as a member of her high school, all-girls robotics team. But it was only after she enrolled at UC Irvine that she discovered her dream job. Chiu, 21, and now a senior UCI student, recently accepted an offer to join the R&D Released Product Engineering department for Medtronic Neurovascular in Irvine, the world’s largest neurovascular company. Medtronic had previously hired her as an intern for two consecutive summers, in addition to six months of part-time work during her junior year.