Engineering Facts

Check out our interesting engineering facts and get some cool trivia related to amazing structures, famous landmarks and other impressive engineering achievements.

Learn about different types of engineering such as civil, mechanical, electrical, chemical and aerospace while enjoying all the incredible information related to famous bridges, buildings, dams, trains, tunnels and more.

• Engineers solve practical problems by applying mathematical and scientific knowledge.
• The word engineer comes from a Latin word meaning ‘cleverness’.
• Learn about different types of engineering jobs such as civil, mechanical and electrical with our engineering job facts.
• As of 2010, the tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, UAE. It reaches an incredible 828 metres (2717 feet) in height. Check out more building facts or our list of the tallest buildings in the world.
• The Great Pyramid of Giza is the oldest of the Ancient Wonders of the World and the last one that remains largely intact. Enjoy more pyramid facts or learn about the Ancient Egyptian pyramids.
• The building of the Panama Canal, which links the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, was one of the most difficult engineering projects ever. It is estimated that over 25000 workers lost their lives during the long and dangerous project, with most dying from disease and landslides.
• Golf balls have dimples because they help reduce drag, this allows the ball to fly further than a smooth ball would.
• As of 2010, the longest suspension bridge in the world is the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Kobe, Japan. Opened in 1998, it spans an amazing 1991 metres (6529 feet). Check out more interesing bridge facts or our list of the longest bridges in the world.
• Used for water distribution, the Delaware Aqueduct in New York, USA is the longest tunnel in the world (as of 2010). Drilled through solid rock, it reaches a staggering 137 kilometres (85 miles) in length. More tunnel facts.
• The Hoover Dam, built along the Colorado River between 1931 and 1936 reaches 726 feet in height (221 metres). More interesting dam facts.
• High speed passenger trains in China reach speeds of up to 350 kph (220 mph).
• The Titanic was 882 feet (269 metres) long.
• The London Eye in England is the largest Ferris wheel in Europe, standing at a height of 135 metres (442 feet).
• The tallest wind turbine in the world has rotor tips that reach over 200 metres (656 feet) above the ground.
• Branches of engineering include aerospace, biomedical, chemical, civil,computer, electrical, environmental, forensic, genetic, mechanical, military,nuclear, reverse, software and structural.

15 Hot New Technologies That Will Change Everything

         The Next Big thing? The memristor, a microscopic component that can "remember" electrical states even when turned off. It's expected to be far cheaper and faster than flash storage. A theoretical concept since 1971, it has now been built in labs and is already starting to revolutionize everything we know about computing, possibly making flash memory, RAM, and even hard drives obsolete within a decade.

The memristor is just one of the incredible technological advances sending shock waves through the world of computing. Other innovations in the works are more down-to-earth, but they also carry watershed significance. From the technologies that finally make paperless offices a reality to those that deliver wireless power, these advances should make your humble PC a far different beast come the turn of the decade.

In the following sections, we outline the basics of 15 upcoming technologies, with predictions on what may come of them. Some are breathing down our necks; some advances are still just out of reach. And all have to be reckoned with.

• Memristor: A Groundbreaking New Circuit
• 32-Core CPUs From Intel and AMD
• Nehalem and Swift Chips Spell the End of Stand-Alone Graphics Boards
• USB 3.0 Speeds Up Performance on External Devices
• Wireless Power Transmission
• 64-Bit Computing Allows for More RAM
• Windows 7: It's Inevitable
• Google's Desktop OS
• Gesture-Based Remote Control
• Radical Simplification Hits the TV Business
• Curtains for DRM
• Use Any Phone on Any Wireless Network
• Your Fingers Do Even More Walking
• Cell Phones Are the New Paper
• Where You At? Ask Your Phone, Not Your Friend
• 25 Years of Predictions

                                                              

Rat Brain Reconstructed in a Computer

by Tia Ghose, Senior Writer   |   October 12, 2015 09:37am E

Scientists have digitally recreated a slice of a juvenile rat's brain — including 31,000 brain cells, of 207 different types, with 37 million connections.

The computer-simulated brain achievement is part of the Blue Brain Project, whose aim is to create a rat brain and, eventually, a human brain inside a computer.

Though the new simulation recreates just a tiny sliver of the rat's brain, the result seems to capture some of the fundamental behavior of neurons, and has even predicted brain behavior that hadn't been found before, the researchers reported Thursday (Oct. 8) in the journal Cell. [See Images of the Digital Rat Brain]

Gathering data

The team first conducted tens of thousands of experiments in live juvenile rats, painstakingly cataloging the types of neurons and synapses, or brain cell connections. After watching the firing of the rat brain cells, the researchers derived principles that governed how the brain cells were arranged.

Yet those experiments covered only a tiny fraction of the connections in this brain region, called the neocortex. To fill out the rest of the picture, the team used a computer program to search all of the existing literature for other data on how neurons in the neocortex function.

"We can't — and don't — have to measure everything," study author Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, said in a statement. "The brain is a well-ordered structure, so once you begin to understand the order at the microscopic level, you can start to predict much of the missing data."

Pruning connections

From there, the team created a 3D computer model of neurons in a virtual volume, using rules about how different neurons are distributed to guide their placement. They created connections, or synapses, wherever these neurons "touched," leading to about 600 millionconnections between neurons, said study co-author Michael Reimann, a neuroinformatics researcher at EPFL. From there, they used five basic biological rules for how connections form to prune these connections, leaving 37 million connections.

Then, the researchers integrated their findings from experiments and other research teams to reconstruct how these connections worked. The new brain seems to closely match the connectivity found in real tissue studied under electron microscopes.

Simulating neurons firing

After all that, the team was finally ready to watch the virtual brain firing. The computer simulation solved billions of equations for every 25 microseconds of neuronal activity.

The team ran "experiments" on the virtual rat brain that mimicked experiments done on real rats.

The digital neurons seemed to behave just like physical neurons do in the lab. For instance, both the in silico and the biological brain tissue showed "triplet" firing patterns, wherein three neurons fire together in a precisely timed sequence. The brain simulation found that these triplets occurred only at specific times.

The digital brain tissue also revealed "chorist" neurons, or brain cells whose activity is tightly synchronized to that of their neighboring cells. Other cells, called "soloists," seem to fire independently of their neighboring neurons. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]

New insights

The digital rat-brain tissue also revealed new findings that could apply to biological systems. For instance, higher calcium levels shifted the virtualbrain tissue into a sleeplike pattern, while lower levels seemed to wake up the digital brain tissue.

"When we decreased the calcium levels to match those found in awake animals and introduced the effect that this has on the synapses, the circuit behaved asynchronously, like neural circuits in awake animals," lead study author Eilif Muller, a physicist at EPFL, said in the statement.

Still, the new brain simulation is just a first draft, Markram said. To get a more thorough representation of the brain, the simulation would need to include other types of brain cells, such as glia, as well as blood vessels. The virtual brain also only includes direct communications between individual brain cells, but a more realistic simulation would account for neuromodulation, in which free-floating brain chemicals tune the behavior of large swaths of neurons in one go, the researchers said.

Follow Tia Ghose on Twitterand Google+. Follow Live Science@livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science.

 The 350-year-old mystery of why pendulum clocks hanging from the same wall synchronize over time may finally be solved, scientists say.
In 1665, Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock, was lying in bed with a minor illness and watching two of his clocks hanging on a wall, said Henrique Oliveira, a mathematician at the University of Lisbon and co-author of a new study detailing the findings. Huygens noticed something odd: No matter how the pendulums on these clocks began, within about a  half-hour, they ended up swinging in exactly the opposite direction from each other.

The cause of this effect — what Huygens called an "odd kind of sympathy" — remained a mystery for centuries. But recently, scientists analyzing two pendulum clocks hanging from the same beam found that the clocks could influence each other through small forces exerted on the supporting beam. However, "nobody tested properly the idea of clocks hanging on the same wall," Oliveira told Live Science. [5 of the Most Precise Clocks Ever Made]