Course: Engineering the Future: Creating the Amazing

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 …

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 …

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 …