Friday, January 20, 2012

UC San Diego's Microgrid Shows Path to the Future of the Power Grid

A video by the Rocky Mountain Institute, a non-profit think-tank based in Colorado, highlighted UC San Diego's microgrid as one of the best-in-class examples of how an electricity network can provide local control but is still interconnected with the larger electricity grid. The video features environmental engineering professor Jan Kleissl and graduate student Bryan Urquhart. Be sure to watch the whole video. The last shot shows Prof. Kleissl using alternative transportation, namely a scooter, to get around campus.

Jacobs School Shake Table Video Spurs Family to Prepare for Earthquakes

The folks at the TV show "Totally Unprepared" recently visited the home of TV reporter Lee Ann Kim and her family here in San Diego. The home was hardly earthquake-proof, so host Ron Haralson, who also is a firefighter, played a video shot on the shake table at Powell Laboratories. It showed unsecured bookshelves, aquariums, wine racks, pictures and even snow globes, falling spectacularly during simulated temblors. "That was scary and bad," one of Lee Ann's sons commented. The family vowed to take some time to get prepared for a potential quake.

Call for Bands / Jacobs School of Rock


The Jacobs School of Rock is coming to the Loft on June 8, 2012.

Are you in a band AND affiliated with the Jacobs School of Engineering. If so, check out the Jacobs School of Rock Facebook page and JSOR website for info on possibly playing the show.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

#RE2012 / Research Expo 2012 / Twitter Hashtag


We've created a Research Expo 2012 hashtag, #RE2012. The Research Expo website displays all twitter posts with #RE2012 and that gives us a quick and fun way to keep the Research Expo news stream fresh, as we lead up to the April 12, 2012 event.  (Here is the full Twitter feed for the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.)

The three main components of Research Expo:

Poster Session
Faculty Talks
Networking

"Microrockets Take Off In Acid" / Joseph Wang research in Chemical & Engineering News

NanoEngineering professor Joseph Wang from the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and colleagues have published work on microrockets that run on acid. Chemical & Engineering News created a great video (embedded below) and wrote a story on the research: "Microrockets Take Off In Acid". This research was published (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja210874s).



The first sentence of Lauren Wolf's story in Chemical & Engineering News:
Microrockets—those tiny, self-propelled, tubular engines being developed to pick up and carry cellular and molecular cargo—can now operate in some natural environments.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams / New York Times / Amin Vahdat

“When we bounce signals off the ceiling, we take advantage of much more bandwidth than we could if we restricted ourselves to a horizontal plane,” says Amin Vahdat, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in large-scale data center architecture and deployment and is working with Dr. Zheng on the project. Dr. Vahdat, who is on sabbatical leave from the university, is also a principal engineer at Google.

This is a quote from Amin Vahdat in a story in the New York Times entitled,  "A Wireless Road Around Data Traffic Jams".

Meet the Founders and CEOs of Biological Dynamics, Cognionics, App2you and EarthRisk Technologies



Meet the Founders and CEOs of Biological Dynamics, Cognionics, App2you and EarthRisk Technologies TODAY at a Technology and Student Showcase, part of the 10th Anniversary Celebration of the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

Learn how inventions are commercialized.

Meet the founders and entrepreneurs that have launched  4 exciting technology companies.
Hear how they are bringing new innovations to the market and the role of the von Liebig Center in the
transition out of the laboratory. 

RSVP

When: Wednesday, January 18, 2012
5:00 - 7:00 p.m.

Where: Qualcomm Conference Center
at the Jacobs School of Engineering
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, California
Inquiries: vonliebigcontact@soe.ucsd.edu or 858-822-1435

Monday, January 9, 2012

Research Expo 2012 site is live.

Research Expo 2012 site is live. Registration opens soon.

Access the talent and technology of the Jacobs School of Engineering. All in one afternoon. Save the date for Research Expo 2012: April 12.

Spacecraft With UCSD-manned Cameras Reach the Moon

Two spacecraft equipped with cameras to be operated by UC San Diego students, many of them from the Jacobs School of Engineering, are now in orbit around the moon. They were launched in September.
The Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission will measure the gravity of the Earth's satellite in unprecedented detail, according to NASA. It also will answer questions about the moon's internal structure.
Also on board the two spacecraft are cameras that will allow middle school classrooms to request pictures of the surface of the moon. The requests will come to a mission command center at UC San Diego, operated by undergraduate students, many of them engineering majors. The students will communicate with NASA's mission control and make sure the cameras take the requested pictures. The mission will being in March of this year and last until May.

The MoonKAM project is led by Sally Ride Science, in collaboration with undergraduates at UC San Diego.
Find out more about MoonKAM here.

Then read recent news coverage of the mission in the San Diego U-T and on KPBS.