Engineering Projects & Trends

A team of engineering professors and an architect at University of Colorado are developing a concept for a “Living Wall.”

In the press release, the description is of a wall “which can efficiently adapt to changes in the surrounding environment through sophisticated heat transfer processes and metabolic adjustments.”

The team received an NSF grant to build a prototype of the living wall that could “reduce current building energy use by 80 to 95 percent.”

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In a recent notebook entry in The Economist, Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic, discussed the technology paradox in which “there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States.”

Labeling engineering an “up or out” profession, Wadhwa talks about companies in the tech world that prefer to hire young, inexperienced engineers. Read more

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The Corporate Social Responsibility Blog from Forbes recently profiled the Drexel Smart House at Drexel University (PA).

The house is “a student-led initiative designed to explore cutting edge technologies that are environmentally friendly.” The house was built in the 1800s and is in an urban environment, which makes it one-of-a-kind.

Click here, for more about the “living laboratory of sustainability”

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