All Features
Danielle Underferth
As municipalities clamor for a slice of President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure spending bill, one Johns Hopkins scientist is re-examining one of the basic elements of road-building: Determining the width of road lanes. But determining the width that provides the highest level of safety,…
Aliyah Kovner
To combat a pandemic, science needs to move quickly. With safe and effective vaccines now widely available, and a handful of promising Covid-19 treatments coming soon, there’s no doubt that many aspects of biological research have been successfully accelerated during the past two years.
Now,…
Adam Zewe
Multiple programs running on the same computer may not be able to directly access each other’s hidden information. But because they share the same memory hardware, their secrets could be stolen by a malicious program through a “memory timing side-channel attack.”
This malicious program notices…
Duxin Sun
It takes 10 to 15 years and around $1 billion to develop one successful drug. Despite these significant investments in time and money, 90 percent of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. Whether because they don’t adequately treat the condition they’re meant to target or the side effects are too…
Violetta Njunina
According to the CDC, approximately one out of six Americans are diagnosed with foodborne diseases each year. Out of this, about 128,000 are hospitalized, and as many as 3,000 lose their lives.
These sorry statistics show why food safety is paramount and why more effort should be put into reducing…
Andrew Moreo, Imran Rahman, Lisa Cain, Trishna Mistry
About 3.5 million people have at least temporarily left the U.S. workforce since March 2020. More than one-third of them—1.2 million—are in the leisure and hospitality industry.
This has created huge problems for restaurants, hotels, and other leisure and hospitality businesses that have struggled…
Anthony Murphy
Kendrick Plastics is an IATF/TS 16949-certified, tier one and tier two supplier of interior decorative trim components and assemblies to the automotive industry. Located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, its 300,000 sq ft engineering and manufacturing facility has more than 50 presses serving fully…
The Un-Comfort Zone With Robert Wilson
When I was a kid, I was enamored of cigarette-smoking movie stars. When I was a teenager, some of my friends began to smoke; I wanted to smoke too, but my parents forbade it. I was also intimidated by the ubiquitous anti-smoking commercials I saw on television warning me that smoking causes cancer…
Grant Ramaley
The IAF Medical Device Working Group has updated one of the most important documents that supports the medical device quality system ISO 13485. IAF MD9:2022—“Application of ISO/IEC 17021-1 in the field of medical device quality management systems (ISO 13485)” provides the mandatory requirements for…
Rodney Rohde
Medical laboratory professionals form the backbone of healthcare and the public health system. They conduct some 13 billion laboratory medicine tests annually in the United States. As of February 2022, these individuals had also performed more than 900 million Covid-19 tests and counting during the…
Ryan E. Day
ISO 9001:2015, Clause 6.1 introduces the term “actions to address risks and opportunities,” as a replacement for the standard’s previous term, “preventive actions.” The juxtaposition of “risks” and “opportunities” seems to imply a relational nature between the two concepts. But is it still…
Georgia Institute of Technology
This country’s semiconductor chip shortage is likely to continue well into 2022. Now, a Georgia Tech expert predicts that the United States will need to make major changes to the manufacturing and supply chain of these all-important chips to stave off further effects. That includes making more of…
Jennifer Helgeson, Maria Dillard
In September 2018, a North Carolina city’s long road to recovery from Hurricane Matthew two years earlier became even longer. Lumberton, a small but diverse city of 21,000 people, 96 km (60 miles) inland from the coast, unfortunately found itself in Hurricane Florence’s sights. The Lumber River,…
Theodoros Evgeniou, Caroline Zimmerman
This isn’t a new story: A novel technology disrupts society, bringing with it many benefits but also major risks and costs. We saw it during the Industrial Revolution, which vastly improved the average living standard but also led to poor labor conditions and environmental degradation, all within a…
Derek Hills
The importance of medical device cybersecurity is growing exponentially. As more devices become connected to the internet, threats to public safety mount. Cybercriminals, formerly interested in stealing financial or medical records, have begun to essentially hold healthcare providers hostage by…
Tahira Reid, James Gibert
People interact with machines in countless ways every day. In some cases, they actively control a device, like driving a car or using an app on a smartphone. Sometimes people passively interact with a device, like being imaged by an MRI machine. And sometimes they interact with machines without…
Rebecca Saenz
There are three key things cobot developers and employers using cobots must remember when considering implementation: 1) human life takes precedence, 2) human life takes precedence, and 3) human life takes precedence.
Dictionary.com defines cobot as “a computer-controlled robotic apparatus that…
Josh Wilson
Paraphrasing Winston Churchill, Rahm Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor, famously quipped that you never want a serious crisis to go to waste. Few of us will face the number of crises that a big-city mayor or a presidential aide may deal with in a day, but we still need…
Megan Wallin Kerth
In the wake of manufacturing and chip shortages, some may think that Covid-19 slowed down production on the whole as supply chain issues and remote work presented significant obstacles for manufacturers. However, there were both struggles and some unexpected benefits that arose as professionals…
William A. Levinson
The U.S. Military Academy’s Honor Code says that “A Cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” Lt. Gen. Darryl A. Williams, the USMA’s superintendent, elaborated, “The tenets of honorable living remain immutable, and the outcomes of our leader development system remain the same,…
Prasad Akella
We are a full two years into post-pandemic manufacturing life, with the omicron variant the latest cause for concern. It might sound hyperbolic, but I’m pretty sure manufacturing will never be the same as it was in 2019. In some ways, that’s a good thing.
One silver lining of the novel coronavirus…
Winnie Jiang
In what has become the most watched commencement speech ever, Steve Jobs had this advice for the class of 2005 at Stanford University: “The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”
Inspiring words from the…
Sybil Derrible, Juyeong Choi, Nazli Yesiller
Communities across the U.S. Southeast and Midwest are assessing damage from the deadly and widespread tornado outbreak on Dec. 10–11, 2021. It’s clear that the cleanups will take months and possibly years.
Dealing with enormous quantities of debris and waste materials is one of the most…
Kate Zabriskie
They’re with me, I just know it, at least I think they’re with me... OK, maybe not. Oh no! They’re gone. Well, thank goodness that’s over!
Has that happened to you? How about the following:
• I addressed this issue 30 minutes ago. How did they forget so soon? They have minds like sieves—easy in…
Bryce Austin
There were seven people seated around the table: The CEO, the VP, the CFO, the special agent from the FBI, the owner, the forensics technician, and the company’s CISO (chief information security officer).
“Don’t pay,” was the CEO’s vote. Same for the VP.
“Pay it,” was the owner’s response. The CFO…
