July-August 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008
Following is a selection of news media stories about Rensselaer people and programs. The stories are listed by date, with the most recent articles first. Note that some publications may require subscriptions or logins to access individual articles online.
08/27/2008
University highlights accomplished alumni in a special publication
CASE Currents
Officials at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York would like you to know that RPI alumni are to thank for the Ferris wheel and Brooklyn Bridge. And the RPI alumni association has created a special publication to spread the word. The brochure profiles graduates who have been inducted into the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame, created in 1995. . . . “It demonstrates the pride that we have in our alumni, to show current and prospective students that they too can ‘stand on the shoulders of giants,’ and one day be inducted into the hall of fame,” says Jeff Schanz, RPI’s assistant vice president for alumni relations.
Read the story. Schanz also was quoted in a recent Daily Gazette story about alumnus George Ferris, inventor of the Ferris Wheel.
08/22/2008
The first modern cyberwar?
The Guardian (UK)
In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Aaron Mannes of the University of Maryland and Rensselaer Tetherless World Constellation Professor James Hendler suggest that Russian attacks on Georgian websites are only a sideshow to the main conflict, but they highlight a major threat to the internet.
Read the commentary.
08/19/2008
Rocket scientists say we’ll never reach the stars
Wired News
Many believe that humanity's destiny lies with the stars. Sadly for us, rocket propulsion experts now say we may never even get out of the Solar System. . . . It would take at least the current energy output of the entire world to send a probe to the nearest star, according to Brice N. Cassenti, an associate professor with the Department of Engineering and Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That's a generous figure: More likely, Cassenti says, it would be as much as 100 times that. "We just can't extract the resources from the Earth," Cassenti said during his presentation. "They just don't exist. We would need to mine the outer planets."
Read the story.
08/18/2008
Milky Way's halo loaded with star streams
USA Today
A new map of the halo of stars that surrounds our Milky Way Galaxy has revealed a complicated structure of crisscrossing stellar streams, many of which have never been detected before. . . .
Heidi Newberg, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and her graduate student Nathan Cole have been trying to follow some of these strands as they wind their way around the galaxy. 'It's a big challenge to piece things together,' said Cole, 'because the stream from one dwarf galaxy can wrap around the [Milky Way] and pass through streams of stars ripped from other dwarf galaxies.' Newberg and Cole found at least two superposed structures, possibly three or more, toward the constellation Virgo where SDSS images revealed an excess of stars covering a huge area of sky.
Read the story.
08/18/2008
IT Schools to Watch
Computerworld
The first sign for Damyon Thompson that his master's of science in IT degree from was going to pay off appeared right after his December 2004 graduation, when he had four job offers from IBM on the table. Then, three and a half years after accepting a position at IBM's Banking Center of Excellence in San Jose, he was chosen to fly to Vietnam and South Africa as part of the center's efforts to study emerging overseas markets. 'That kind of assignment is usually reserved for people with more experience,' he says. 'But the program at RPI gave me a leg up, and I was able to hit the ground running.'
Read the story.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
08/18/2008
Engineer prof polishes strokes for U.S. Olympics swimmers
San Jose Mercury News
We watch Olympic swimming and see Michael Phelps rocket across the pool at impossible speeds.
Professor Timothy Wei watches Olympic swimmers and sees engineering questions. Wouldn't it be cool if the water flow around swimmers could be measured? And if fluid mechanics could help swimmers adjust their strokes to go faster? The answer to both questions, Wei says, is yes. The professor of fluids mechanics at
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been working with USA Swimming the governing body of competitive swimming in the United States for about five years.
Read the story, which also was covered by the Toronto Star and Slashdot.
Read the Rensselaer news release and watch video of Prof. Wei’s flow research.
08/18/2008
Scientists create small amounts of safer heparin
Reuters
Scientists have created tiny amounts of a fully synthetic version of the drug heparin in a move that may avoid the risk of contamination, blamed for the death of more than 80 U.S. patients earlier this year. So far,
Robert Linhardt and colleagues at the U.S.-based Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have only made milligram doses of the product — a commonly used blood thinner — but they are already working on ways to expand production to kilograms. . . . 'Ultimately, drug companies are going to need to produce tons of this drug to keep up with global demand,' Linhardt said. 'Such levels of productions are further down the road. We think that in five years, it is very possible that this drug could reach human clinical trials.'
Read the story, which also was covered by a wide variety of media outlets including CBS News Radio, Bloomberg, Wired News, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Chemistry World, and MedPage Today.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
08/15/2008
Profile of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Countdown to College Radio Show
James Nondorf, vice president for enrollment and dean of undergraduate and graduate admissions and financial aid at Rensselaer, was interviewed for a profile of Rensselaer on the Countdown to College Radio Show, which airs on WNSH AM 1570 in the Boston area.
Listen to the interview.
08/14/2008
Making use of high-tech asset
Times Union
New York state is making Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's powerful IBM supercomputer in North Greenbush available for free use by businesses, academics and state agencies. The announcement came Wednesday from officials at the state Office for Technology and the New York State Foundation for Science, Technology and Innovation, also called NYSTAR. The $100 million supercomputer, which was paid for by the state, RPI and IBM Corp., can perform 100 trillion calculations per second. . . . John Kolb, chief information officer at RPI, said the powerful computer system at the center runs on more than 32,000 processors, allowing for complex computations to be run in parallel.
Read the story, which was also covered by the Daily Gazette and the Business Review.
08/07/2008
Swimmers "see" the water with help of professor
New York Times via Associated Press
USA Swimming has been working with engineering professor Tim Wei of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for about five years to record and analyze what happens in the water when athletes perform motions like the butterfly kick or breaststroke. Used on a limited basis so far, the work already has won over at least one coach who says he has used lessons learned from the high-tech movies to make his swimmers faster. "I can confidently say that it helped my athletes get here," assistant women's coach Sean Hutchison wrote in an e-mail from Beijing. He called Wei's work "an advantage over our competition." . . . "Tim's work has monumentally improved my effectiveness as a coach," he said.
Read the story, which received wide coverage around the world, including Yahoo! India, the Calcutta Telegraph, Technology Review, the Houston Chronicle, the Times Union, and several other Capital Region media outlets.
Read the Rensselaer news release and watch video of Prof. Wei’s flow research.
08/07/2008
A PC made with Lego Bricks
CNET Crave Blog
Luke Andersen, a computer science major from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, built the PC completely out of black Lego bricks. He first created the plans for his PC via a simple CAD program. Then he bought 1,238 Lego pieces (for a total of $140) to assemble his masterpiece, complete with a removable panel so he can get in there to upgrade the PC without destroying the whole thing. . . . What's more, if you want to give this a go yourself, Luke has kindly made his CAD models available to download. Mucho impressivo, Luke. We salute you.
Read the story.
08/04/2008
Some take a dim view of tech lights
Associated Press via the San Francisco Chronicle
Turn off the lamps in a living room or bedroom today, and chances are good the room will still be aglow with the tiny diode lights of a half-dozen gadgets. . . . Blue LEDs have become particularly popular for electronics, and that's part of the problem. In dim light, our eyes are more sensitive to colors at the blue end of the spectrum, so blue LEDs look brighter, said
Mariana Figueiro of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center in Troy, N.Y. . . . Figueiro is helping the Navy figure out whether blue light can help submariners adjust to their watch schedules.
Read the AP story, which was picked up by media outlets around the country, including Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, the Tampa Tribune, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Arizona Star.
07/28/2008
Many Fans of L.E.D.'s Say This Bulb's Time Has Come
New York Times
Not everyone is sanguine about the technology’s future. "L.E.D.'s will gain dominance in downlighting, outdoor and track lighting," said
Mark Rea, director of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "I do not see a major step toward change in general illumination without transforming the infrastructure. To say L.E.D.’s will change everything, I don’t buy it. I think a lot of it is hype.” Mr. Rea noted that work in the lab on compact fluorescents is creating versions that have improved color, start instantaneously and operate in cold temperatures.
Read the story.
07/25/2008
Scientist Builds Visual Circuits to Harness Your Brain's GPU
Wired News
A cognitive scientist wants to employ M.C. Escher's bag of optical tricks to get your eyes to solve logic problems. More specifically,
Mark Changizi, a former Caltech fellow and current cognitive science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that human beings can use their brain's visual-processing abilities to solve LSAT-style logic puzzles, simply by staring at images designed to get their eyes to compute. . . . 'Autistic people can't be any smarter than us, but probably what they have is the ability to harness parts of their brains that we can't,' Changizi said. 'What their amazing powers show is that we have these amazing powers. We totally under-appreciate the powers of computation that we use all the time.'
Read the story.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
07/16/2008
Region wins in $1.6B IBM pact
Times Union
Although it's unclear where the new packaging center will be located, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy will play an important role at the facility as a research partner. Kelly said that IBM's $100 million supercomputer at the Rensselaer Technology Park in North Greenbush will be "very synergistic" with the packaging facility. . . . Kelly, an RPI graduate, said Robert Hull, an RPI professor and head of the school's materials science and engineering department, will play a role at the packaging center. . . . Hull released a statement saying the "breadth of our faculty's expertise in materials science, semiconductors and electronic packaging, is a natural fit" for the center. "We look forward to exploring opportunities for further collaboration with our valued partner," Hull said.
Read the story, which was also covered by the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, the Times Herald-Record, and other Capital Region outlets.
07/15/2008
Wireless Device Helps Illuminate the Role of Light on Human Health
Scientific American
In an effort to gauge exactly how light affects our body clocks,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Lighting Research Center (LRC) in Troy, N.Y., has developed a device called a Daysimeter. . . . 'We envision the Daysimeter, along with other biological markers [such as hormones] will allow us to get a more detailed circadian profile of a particular person,' says
LRC director Mark Rea, a Rensselaer professor of cognitive science. Researchers can measure the effect of circadian light exposure on hormone levels through blood samples collected from subjects. 'We're fully expecting that we'll see variation among the population,' he notes.
Read the story.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
07/07/2008
Hot rods make boiling better
Nature News
For a faster, more bubbly boil, try adding a layer of copper nanorods to the inside of your kettle. Researchers led by
Nikhil Koratkar at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have discovered that lining a copper pot with copper nanorods makes water boil much more quickly. . . . “Classical theories for boiling predict that bubbles should not nucleate from nanopores due to the very high surface tension forces at that scale,” says Koratkar. The team's experiments used a copper surface covered in nanorods up to 50 nanometres in diameter and placed this in a liquid chamber. The rods had a dramatic effect on bubble formation: Koratkar saw 30 times more bubbles forming on his copper nanorod-lined surface than on a surface made from just copper.
Read the story, which was also covered by the BBC World Service’s Science in Action, Scientific American, Computerworld, and the Times Union.
Read the Rensselaer news release.
