Fields of flowers

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It’s not often that someone presents you with a completely new way of looking at the world around us but that’s what Dr Gregory Sutton did a few weeks ago at a Royal Society Regional Networking Event in Bristol where he is a University Research Fellow funded by the Royal Society. He told us that every flower is a conductor sticking out of the ground which on a sunny day has an electric field around it of the order of 100 volts per metre. Bees can identify the type of flower that they are approaching based on the interaction between this field and the electrostatic field generated around them as they fly. Bees are covered in tiny hairs and he believes that they use these to sense the electric field around them. The next research question that he is tackling is how bees are affected by the anthropogenic electric fields from power lines, mobile phones etc.

The plots of the electric field around a flower really caught my attention. You can see one in the thumbnail photo. I walked across Brandon Hill in Bristol after the talk to meet a former PhD student for dinner. I kept stopping on the way to try to detect this field with the hairs on the back of my hand. It was a beautiful sunny day but I was not sensitive enough to feel anything. Or maybe I was sensing it but my brain is not programmed to recognise the sensation. We discussed it over dinner and marvelled at the bees’ ability to process the information from its multiple sensors in the light of our knowledge of the computing power required to handle what it is fashionable to call ‘Big Data’ from man-made sensors.

Once again Nature humbles us with its ingenuity and makes our efforts look clumsy if not feeble. Dr Sutton’s insights have given me a whole new way to attempt to connect with Nature while I am on deep vacation.

Sorry about the pun in the title. I couldn’t resist it.

Source:

Clarke D, Whitney H, Sutton G & Robert D, Detection and Learning of Floral Electric Fields by Bumblebee, Science, 5 April 2013: 66-69. [DOI:10.1126/science.1230883].

Limitless energy

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neil hunterThe Sun supplies approximately 100,000 TeraWatts (TW) of energy to the Earth continuously. To put this into perspective the entire generating capacity of China is 1TW and the global population as a whole uses 15TW. Plants use about 100TW via photosynthesis. Most our energy consumption is derived from biomass created millions of years ago by photosynthesis and stored as coal, gas or oil when the plant died and was crushed by geological processes.

I am stealing and paraphrasing from Professor Neil Hunter’s presentation at the Royal Society’s Scientific Discussion Meeting on Bio-inspiration for New Technologies. Of course, as Neil pointed out, the energy from the Sun arrives across a range of wavelengths some of which are damaging to our health. So fortunately for us the Earth’s atmosphere filters out a number of wavelengths but nevertheless a broad band of wavelengths still arrives at the Earth’s surface. Photosynthesis only makes use of two relatively narrowbands of light….

Mankind’s efforts to use solar energy look pathetic alongside Nature’s performance and should be humbling to any engineer or scientist. But it is also an inspiration to do better. We need cheap clean energy for everyone. It is being delivered everyday but we don’t know how to use it.

Happiness is …engineering

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164-6499_IMGCreativity, which is an important component of problem-solving, has been associated with workplace success, healthy psychological functioning and the maintenance of loving relationships [see my post entitled ‘Love an Engineer’ on September 24th, 2014].  Engineering is all about creative problem-solving so it should come as no surprise that engineering was rated as the happiest job in a recent survey [see last week’s post].

However, I would like to offer an alternative formula for happiness. According to Timothy Egan in the International NYT on May 16-17th, 2015 when Pope Francis was asked about his secret to happiness he said, ‘Slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Don’t proselytise. Work for peace. Work at a job that offers basic human dignity. Don’t hold on to negative feelings. Move calmly through life. Enjoy art, books and playfulness.’

This sounds like a pretty good formula to me. As engineers, while we are enjoying art and books we can take inspiration from art and nature.

Sources:

Martin L & Schwartz D, 2014, A pragmatic perspective on visual representation and creative thinking, Visual Studies, 29(1):80-93.

Egan T, The pope and the art of joy. International New York Times, 16-17th May, 2015.

Choosing a career is like going shopping

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WIN_20150616_121335When we go shopping many of us like to try things out and think about when we will use them, or wear them if they are clothes.  Susan Scurlock made this analogy at the Annual Congress of the UK Engineering Professors’ Council in April 2015 when she was talking about keeping children connected to engineering from the playroom floor to a career [see last week’s posting entitled ‘Everyone is born an engineer’].  It focusses attention on the important issue that if we want to attract young people into the engineering profession we have to let them try it out and we also have to offer an enticing prospect.

This might be obvious but we need something attractive to offer. And here, we have a problem because our male-dominated profession has created courses that appear boring and uninspiring to many in society.  This was one of the premises of a National Science Foundation project in the USA that I was involved in which looked at options for change in the engineering curriculum at university.   The main problem is not conceiving imaginative effective changes but persuading colleagues to implement these changes. It can work and there are shining examples such as those programmes with a focus on reducing global poverty and inequality at UC Berkeley and other enlightened institutions which were described by Sarah Mazzetti recently in the New York Times.

We have another big selling point that we tend to keep quiet about. Engineering is the happiest job in the world according to analysis by the Guardian newspaper on April 8th, 2015.

For more on the results of that NSF project see:

Busch-Vishniac, I., Kibler, T., Campbell, P.B., Patterson, E.A., Guillaume, D., Jarosz, J., Chassapis, C., Emery, A., Ellis, G., Whitworth, H., Metz, S., Brainard, S., Ray, P., 2011, Deconstructing Engineering Education Programmes: The DEEP Project to reform the mechanical engineering curriculum, European J Engng Education, 36(3):269-283.

Patterson, E.A., Campbell, P.B., Busch-Vishniac, I., Guillaume, D.W., 2011, The effect of context on student engagement in engineering, European J. Engng Education, 36(3):211-224.