Features

Engineers take from their surroundings and make something greater than the sum of its parts. But materials engineers go one step further, creating entirely new materials and structures from which to work.

In 2000, nuclear energy from just 30 countries provided approximately 15 percent of worldwide electricity capacity. But by 2019, its share had fallen to 10 percent, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) predicting that without intervention it would fall even further, to 5 percent, by 2040. That represents a significant drop in what could be an important source of clean energy.

There’s a long history of women breaking barriers in mathematics: from Ada Lovelace, considered the world’s first computer programmer, to Sofia Kovalevskaya, the first woman to receive a PhD in mathematics, to Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to receive the Fields Medal.

The concepts of civil engineering are particularly well-suited for the game environment, emphasizing the proper distribution of resources, the management of supply chains, and how the built environment interacts with the lived environment.

For most of history, urbanization was largely unplanned. That led to overcrowding, inequality, inefficiency, and acute susceptibility to other preventable crises. But today’s cities are armed with some of the most powerful tools ever made available to urban planners: geospatial data and GIS (geographic information systems).

For the last few years, AI has been trumpeted as the solution to many of the future’s problems, especially in the field of healthcare. But in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s being asked to deal with the here-and-now. So far, it’s up to the task.

There’s rarely a dull moment in the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency. But staying on top of the latest events isn’t easy. True to the decentralized, cypherpunk origins of its subject matter, blockchain and cryptocurrency news runs a little wilder, and a little more scatterbrained, than what you might be used to.

“Between 20 and 25 percent of the US population has some form of accessibility issue, ranging from the type of that is more visible, i.e., someone who is deaf or blind, to the more mundane, but nonetheless important, ideas of faulty memory or needing larger print sizes,” Keats says.

GIS adds a new dimension to the concept of Big Data. By factoring in the context of time and space, geographic information systems (GIS) allow the human eye to observe how massive data sets change over time and better recognize the patterns that emerge as a result.

The current US student loan debt is an astounding $1.53 trillion, with one in four Americans owing money. Unsurprisingly, student loan debt is the second-largest source of debt after mortgages.