Profiles in Engineering, August 2012

The first human to set foot on the Moon passed away this weekend. Neil Armstrong was 82. Before becoming commander of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, he attained an engineering degree, was a U.S. Navy officer in the Korean War, and served as a test pilot at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics High-Speed Flight Station. Click here to read the obituary from The New York Times

Τ

The Daily Hampshire Gazette recently profiled Caitlyn Shea Butler and her “green latrine.” Dr. Butler is an assistant of environmental engineering at the University of Massachusetts and is currently testing her latrine in Ghana. Her latrine is unique in that “it employs waste-eating bacteria to produce power.” Read the article to learn other benefits of the green latrine, including “producing low-cost fertilizer and generating enough electricity to power a small light inside the lavatory building.”

Β

An award-winning electrical engineer from Memphis, TN, has recently obtained a patent and created a new company to bring to market software he invented “that blends Pixar-like animation with the interactiveness of video gaming for the assembly line.” According to the article, his new investors believe that his Reality PV software “will really revolutionize the manufacturing process as far as quality and even the accounting part of it and training the workers.”

The story from The Commercial Appeal (TN) details the engineer’s previous success as founder of Electronic Controls Inc. (ECI) and his struggles in bringing his new invention to market.

Π