Welcome to our third and final week of Engineering the Future. Although this is the last week of the course, we’ll be asking you to get out your ‘crystal ball’ …
Welcome to Week 2 – we’re going to be thinking about several ways that engineers interact with or influence the environment. Over to you Share your initial ideas about: Where …
Welcome to our course on ‘Engineering the Future – Creating the Amazing! Over the next three weeks we will be exploring the concepts of sensors, signals and systems, and in …
In How Environmental Noise is Measured we discussed how noise is largely characterised by measuring the Sound Pressure Level (SPL) and reporting this in decibels (dB). Using decibels as our …
One of the most commonly used medical diagnostics tests is the pregnancy test. Despite looking quite simple, the pregnancy test is actually extensively engineered. Everything from the outer plastic casing …
The object of this exercise is to enable you to think about how complex biological samples are. A drop of blood or saliva may not look like much to us, …
The word ‘Biomarkers’ is a combination of ‘biological’ and ‘markers’ and refers to the various indicators that we can use to detect the processes happening inside a person. These processes …
Medicine is the science concerned with the study, prevention, diagnosis and management of disease. As the popular saying goes: ‘what can be measured can be managed’. We’re expanding that saying …
The activities this week are all designed to help us consider the key role that future technology such as robots and virtual reality will play in all our lives. We’ve …
The diagram below shows a basic drawing of the ear. Image Copyright: Duncan Williams 2013 The ear is basically split into three sections; the outer, middle and inner ear. The …
For a number of years the technology that allows us to immerse ourselves in artificial environments has been getting better and better. A key requirement for better immersion is better …
Space is an extreme environment. Robots, rovers and probes face a whole range of hazards during space missions: from extreme temperatures, to cosmic radiation, to corrosion caused by gases in …
Since 1950, there have been over 320 human-crewed missions into space. There have also been on average 100 launches into and beyond the Earth’s orbit each year. These are mostly …
Given the importance of water to our health, it is clearly important that we regularly drink water and keep our bodies hydrated. Around 70% of the global population use a …
Bacterial contamination of water can come from many different sources; waste or faecal matter are two possible sources, as are insects that land in stagnant water. But how do you …