Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center (CEEC) Announced

Tags

CEEC, Columbia, electrochemistry, energy, energy storage, grand challenges, interdisciplinary

Based in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Columbia has officially lunched the Columbia Electrochemical Energy Center (CEEC). There are nine core faculty members in the center,  which brings together interdisciplinary teams of students and faculty from chemical, earth & environmental, mechanical, and electrical engineering to tackle grand challenges in electrochemical energy conversion technologies.  Find out more about the center in this SEAS press release and/or check out these videos promoting the new center:

 

 

 

3D Printing Pen

Tags

3D printing, design, educational outreach, engineering, videos

Check out this 3D printing pen. This could be quite useful for welding 3d printed parts together instead of using epoxy. It works with both PLA and ABS. Also, they sell an an educational bundle for outreach education — they share a bunch of class room curricula on their website.

Dr. Yiying Wu’s Reddit AMA

Tags

batteries, outreach, reddit, solar, solar fuels

Dr. Yiying Wu from Ohio State posted an AMA (Ask Me Anything) yesterday on Reddit’s science forum, where he answers questions about his work on solar batteries. This is a great way to increase public awareness of solar battery research, and is worth checking out if you have the time.

Ted Talk on creativity

Tags

creativity, education, invent, Ted Talks

Applying our core engineering and scientific knowledge and skills to research problems is important, but another vitally important skill to solving tough, open-ended problems, is creativity.  If you haven’t seen it already, this is well worth your 20 minutes to watch:

“If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. By the time they get to become adults, most kids have lost that capacity [to be wrong]. .. .they have become frightened to be wrong… the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”