In This Issue
Winter Bridge on Frontiers of Engineering
December 18, 2019 Volume 49 Issue 4
The winter issue of The Bridge is focused on the 2019 Frontiers of Engineering symposium.
Articles In This Issue
  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorRonald M. Latanision

    Once again the winter issue of The Bridge is focused on the NAE Frontiers of Engineering (FOE) symposium. Jennifer West, chair of the organizing committee for the 2019 program, which was held at Boeing in North Charleston, SC, assembled a superb program that is highlighted in these pages.

    We also ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorJohn L. Anderson

    “A scientist studies what is, whereas an engineer creates what never was.”

           – Theodore von Kármán[1]

    The National Academy of Engineering carries the flag of the engineering profession in the United States. But when I asked the ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorJennifer West

    This year’s US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium was hosted by Boeing, September 25–27 in North Charleston, SC, and brought together a very diverse group of talented young engineers representing the best and brightest from academia, industry, government, and nonprofit sectors across ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorPamela A. Kobryn

    The digital twin concept involves simulating the future performance of a specific product or system based on current knowledge about the system and how it is operated. Key aspects of the concept include near- and long-term performance predictions individualized to both the particular product/system ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorKris Saha

    Editing the genetic code of living organisms with word-processing-like capabilities has been a goal of life scientists and engineers for decades. For biomedical applications, changing as little as a single base in the 3 billion bases of the human genome might cure disorders such as muscular ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorOmar S. Akbari

    The annual incidence of vector-borne disease exceeds 1 billion globally—roughly half of the world’s population is at risk of infection.[1] Mosquito-borne diseases account for the majority of cases (WHO 2014), but there are no vaccines for most of them, so prevention, mainly through ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorPatrick Boyle

    Biology is the most powerful known manufacturing “technology.” Proof of this is all around: at the continental scale, the Earth’s land surface is defined by plant life, much of which has been harnessed with agriculture. At the nanoscale, biological systems routinely self-organize ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorSamantha Maragh

    A revolution is underway to reengineer the blueprint for life: the genetic code, whose sequence determines identity and function for every living organism. The genome (expressed in DNA base pairs) is the entire complement of an organism’s genetic code and is housed in the basic functional ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorJohn Basl and Jeff Behrends

    Autonomous vehicles (AVs) raise a host of ethical challenges, including determining how they should interact with human drivers in mixed-traffic environments, assigning responsibility when an AV crashes or causes a crash, and how to manage the social and economic impacts of AVs that displace human ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorDorsa Sadigh

    Society is rapidly advancing toward autonomous systems that interact and collaborate with humans—semiautonomous vehicles interacting with drivers and pedestrians, medical robots used in collaboration with doctors, or service robots interacting with their users in smart homes.

    A key aspect of ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorJacob Leshno

    Bitcoin was introduced in 2008 as a computer protocol establishing a decentralized system that allows users to hold balances and make transfers to one another (Nakamoto 2008). Computer systems that provided similar services have existed for decades, but required a trusted party to control and ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorJyotirmoy Mazumder

    Higher education in engineering in the United States has been driven by engineering science since the Second World War, geared toward in-depth understanding of engineering science for long-term benefits. The model -proposed by Vannevar Bush, recommending more emphasis on science in education to ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorSamuel C. Florman

    I am extremely pleased to see that as of the spring 2019 issue of The Bridge a new EES Interface column has been added. This collaboration with the NAE’s Center for Engineering Ethics and Society is an excellent development. It offers thoughtful perspectives, sometimes slightly different from ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    Author Gary Taubes

    RON LATANISION (RML): Hello, Gary, we’re really happy to have this opportunity to talk with you today. I see that you are an aerospace engineer, is that right?

    GARY TAUBES: I have a master’s in science and engineering from Stanford.

      Photo of Gary Taubes

    CAMERON FLETCHER (CHF): ...

  • Wednesday, December 18, 2019
    AuthorGuru Madhavan

    In architecture, fundamental concepts such as aspect ratios—how the width of a structure relates to the height—matter a great deal. But Sir Ove Nyquist Arup interpreted them broadly. For him, such elements were only a component of “total design.” He believed that structures ...