Engineering
Hydrogen fuel research at WSU
Washington State University is home to the Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) Laboratory. As the only cryogenic hydrogen research laboratory in US academia, HYPER has a number of projects to improve hydrogen production and storage, all at extremely cold temperatures below 130 Kelvin (-225°F).
Read more about hydrogen fuel and the rising green hydrogen economy.
Hydrogen refueling stations
Current refueling stations use large and expensive hydrogen compressors to achieve the necessary pressure for fuel storage. Those large compressors are also prone to breakdowns. A new method called cryogenic thermal compression being tested at WSU may … » More …
How to encourage a girl: Improving diversity in STEM
“Your daughter is obviously good at math,” the teacher says to the girl’s parents at a fourth-grade parent-teacher meeting.
The parents have noticed this, too, and suggest to the fourth grader that she study physics, astronomy, maybe engineering or another math-intensive field. As she gets older, she remains interested in all those things, but she’s also picking up messages that are telling her something quite different.
She and her family are avid Big Bang Theory fans. They’ve watched every episode. So even as her parents and teachers are saying, “You’re good at this!” and “Follow your passion!” she’s seeing portrayals of men in gendered professions, … » More …
I, scientist
Winds of change
Sensing something wrong with bridges
The McNair connection
A better sense of health monitoring
Making artificial intelligence smart
It’s not a simple thing to get a car to see what we see.
“The world is very complex. That’s what makes vision for self-driving cars a challenge. There are millions of scenarios and millions of contexts,” says Carolina Parada (’04, ’06 MS Elec. Eng.) from her home in Boulder, Colorado.
A senior manager for Nvidia, a company probably best known in the video gaming community for its top-shelf graphics cards but with a strong presence in the machine learning market, Parada and her team are working on machine perception, a key piece of getting self-driving cars safely on the
… » More …
Physics at the bat
Today’s baseball game, brought to you by Physics Unlimited, is a blockbuster contest between the famous Mathematical Physicists and Washington State University’s own Oblique Collisions.
As the Oblique Collisions take the field, Ernest Rutherford, the renowned English physicist, is first up for the Mathematical Physicists. Better known outside physics circles for his cricketing skills, Rutherford is quite the hitter, though usually of particles much smaller than baseballs.
Indeed, in describing the collision of an alpha particle—better known as the nucleus of a helium atom, two protons and two massive neutrons—with a gold atom, Rutherford had this to say: “It was as if you fired a … » More …