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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...

NASA is developing next-generation computational materials capabilities to support the qualification of additively manufactured metallic -structural components for aerospace applications. The quality of these parts directly depends on a wide range of process parameters, including build conditions ...

Why study walking and running robots, and bipedal robots in particular? Because robots can go where people can’t or shouldn’t go because it isn’t safe, such as malfunctioning nuclear power plants, or the staircases and corridors of burning buildings—places designed to be ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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): ...

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 ...