Scientific Studies, Research Labs, & Engineering Protection

New scientific study shows that a “nature-made cleanup crew” has been helping reduce the gulf oil plume.

Petroleum-eating bacteria that usually feed “on oil seeping naturally through the seafloor” have “not only out competed fellow microbes, they each ramped up their own internal metabolic machinery to digest the oil as efficiently as possible.”

Read the article from The Washington Post for more on the research done by a team of scientists led by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (CA) and other similar research.

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Popular Science has a new feature story on “30 awesome college labs” throughout the country.” The slideshow includes an image, a brief summary, and a link to the respective website. View all the labs here

Included in the 30 highlighted labs was the UAH Propulsion Research Center and Dr. Marlow Moser (UT B ’83). Other cool labs that made the list: University of Maryland, Space Systems Lab; Colorado State University, Engines and Energy Conversion Lab; Texas Tech University, Wind Science & Engineering Research Center; Montana State University, Subzero Science & Engineering Lab; and many more.

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An update on the New Orleans protection system was recently done by The New York Times. Read the article

Five years after Katrina, a two-mile long, 26-foot high wall is being built along with “a ring of 350 miles of linked levees, flood walls, gates, and pumps that surrounds the city.”

Two questions remain: is the new protection system enough to keep New Orleans from future devastation and does the population have confidence in the job being done.

University of California, Berkeley, professor Robert G. Bea, Ph.D., P.E., (FL A ’60) says that he has seen “lots of positive changes” in the Army Corps of Engineers but said (the) 100-year protection “is not even close to what is needed. The system needs a greater margin of safety,” he said.

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