When people think about engineering, they usually think of mechanical engineers. Bioengineering is an interesting engineering discipline that is less visible. Bioengineers often apply engineering principles to biological systems and use the building blocks of life to assemble artificial life. They engineer enzymes with new-to-nature functionality and create biomedical technologies.
Since the beginning of time nature has created tantalizing beauty and complexity in the macroscopic and microscopic world. Today’s bioengineers focus on the microscopic world, there work remaining invisible to the naked eyes. A major goal of many bioengineers is to increase structural and functional diversity in enzymes or to create and assemble completely new enzymes, enzyme complexes and enzyme cascades.
Read moreElectrification of transport is a topic that is gaining momentum all over the world, still mostly in developed countries, at an accelerating pace. This is about replacing the internal combustion engine that has been responsible for moving vehicles in the last century, with an electric motor that uses the electrochemical energy stored inside a battery to do the same thing instead.
Electric vehicles’ uptake forecasts being published every year show that conventional vehicles with internal combustion engines may become images of the past in as little as 30 years. But what about all the electric energy required to get this growing fleet of electric vehicles moving? The transport sector needs to get interestingly close to the energy sector going forward. These two sectors have traditionally been completely distinct. Conventional vehicles needed to fill up their tanks with gas found in gas stations, while the energy sector had to only worry about producing and transferring electricity for keeping our lights on across the world. This is now changing, since all the energy required to charge up the batteries of electric vehicles needs to be provided through charge points installed at all various locations always connected to the electricity grid.
Read moreIt is remarkable that we use so much technology in our daily lives whilst most of us know very little about the underlying mechanisms of how it works. From online dating to ordering shopping online from Alexa, to being given suggestions by Netflix of shows we might like, we are increasingly interacting with AI all the time. The intelligence of machines is developing exponentially according to experts in the field. Due to this explosion in machine intelligence, it’s important for everyone — from your grandma to a 5th grader — to know the basics of AI. This is not only because we use so many different applications of AI in our daily lives, but because the influence of AI on the future of humanity is only going to get greater for all of us at current pace. Furthermore, we are part of this grand experiment, with the majority of us increasingly spending more of our work and personal lives online. We are choosing and shaping our digital existence and so it makes sense to understand the underlying technology at play.
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