News & Ideas, July 2010

According to a report from PayScale.com, “petroleum engineering majors and graduates of Harvey Mudd College” receive the best salaries.

The top four “best-paying degrees this year” were all engineering. Read the article from CNN

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Wired is reporting that the Air Force Research Laboratory (OH) is looking for businesses “to build what it calls an Intelligent Robo-Pallet: mechanical platforms that can haul stuff onto its planes autonomously.”

The Air Force is not the only one thinking about this technology, so is FedEx and their CEO who has said “he wants a fleet of drone cargo aircraft led by a single piloted plane.”
Read more here

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In a new study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the benefits of whitening the world’s roofs are discussed.

Using a land surface model from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, researchers determined that whitening the world’s roofs “would offset the emissions of the world’s cars for 20 years.” Read the full article from Popular Science for more details of the study that was recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters

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