Innovation in Engineering, June 2011

Researchers from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital have built “the world’s first biological laser, made from a single living cell.”

The human cell was engineered to express green fluorescent protein that could be amplified “into super-short pulses of laser light.” The research is being done in part to study interactions between electronic and biological systems. Click here to read the article from Popular Science

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Aviation Week recently reported on a proposal by Aerojet to develop “a novel combined-cycle propulsion system for reusable hypersonic vehicles.” Read the full article

Chief engineer of advanced propulsion and mission architecture at Aerojet, Mel Bulman (NY G ’68), says, “the concept is attracting U.S. Air Force interest as a possible pathway to a high-speed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) or strike aircraft.”

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Last week a international satellite was deployed into low-Earth “to track changes in the amount of salt in the upper levels of the world’s oceans.”

NASA has an instrument on board the satellite to measure the concentration of dissolved salt at the sea surface. There are seven other instruments that will collect environmental data, click here to learn more

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