Engineering FYI, Part II, June 2010

Dane County, WI, has selected AECOM to develop a system for turning food waste into electricity.

Before a food digester is constructed, AECOM plans to “complete a local feasibility study on the renewable energy potential of food waste from commercial, industrial, and institutional sources.”

Read the article, here, for more information

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In a recent article from BNET, a new hiring strategy by General Motors (GM) was featured. Last year GM hired 55 graduates from Challenge X and 16 from the on-going EcoCar competition.

Because of the focus on electric vehicles, automakers like GM are finding it useful to sponsor collegiate competitions, judge and mentor them, and then “take the pick of the litter from among the kids who put themselves on the line 24-7.”

Read the article for more on the success of these new such hires and on the competitions themselves, including a profile of a student who is now an energy storage integration engineer at GM.

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Two groups of researchers reported efforts related to engineering lungs in the lab, recently, in the journal Science.

One group “has successfully engineered a lung that can sustain a living rat and the other has created a lung-mimicking device for toxicology studies.”

The Los Angeles Times reports that the latest testing is bringing the possibility of growing a human lung for transplants closer and closer. Read the article for commentary from one of the researchers from Yale University.

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