One of the perks of having friends in high places is the “behind-the-scenes tour,” and this past weekend, the Rensselaer community got a multimedia tour from some very well-placed friends: the Rensselaer School of Science Dean Laurie Leshin, and three Rensselaer alumni, all of whom are working on NASA’s Curiosity Rover mission, currently roving the surface of Mars.

Before an audience of hundreds in the concert hall of the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Leshin and alumni Michael Meyer, Frederick Serricchio, and Kobie Boykins took us though the challenges of designing the launch vehicle, spaceship, and rover, surviving the spectacular “seven minutes of terror” between space and the Martian surface, and some of the findings (including 3-D images) now being transmitted to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Curiosity is a large mobile laboratory, nearly five times as heavy as its older sisters Spirit and Opportunity. After a journey of eight months, the rover reached the surface of Mars in August, and will travel farther on the Red Planet than any previous Rover, using a sophisticated payload of 10 instruments to seek water, organic materials, and other indicators of habitability in Martian rocks and dust.

The inside scoop has its benefits. For example, to the unitiated, this close-up image of crumbling rock doesn’t do much to impress, until Leshin explained that scientists know only one way the rounded pebbles seen in the photo can be formed: through exposure to flowing water.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

But the best part, frankly, is that these guys put on one heck of a show. Enough talk. Check it out above!

Click here for bios of Leshin, Meyer, Serricchio, and Boykins.

Rensselaer recently hosted its 14th annual wumpus competition (officially titled the “Lego Robot Roundup”). The competition is the final project for students enrolled in the freshman Minds & Machines class and is a good chance for them to display newly acquired skills in deductive reasoning. Students build and program a robot to grab a bag of gold from the cave of the wumpus who – for those of you who didn’t know – is an evil monster. The unique course is offered through the Rensselaer Cognitive Science Department.

By a cave, what I actually mean is a 4×4 grid painted on a piece of plywood. The robot travels from square to square using clues like a “stench” and a “breeze” (delivered to the robot “brain” as signals transferred via remote control) to deduce the presence of both the wumpus, and a couple of “bottomless holes” also scattered around the cave.

Well, all of this is far more clear in the video – check it out!

Broken Breakout from lawson shawn on Vimeo.

Word recently reached the street that Rensselaer is making a contribution to Saratoga First Night 2012 in signature techie style with the “Hands-off Arcade,” a collection of retro games retooled for the Microsoft Kinect gaming hardware. Shawn Lawson, an associate professor of arts and faculty member in the Rensselaer Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program, said all the games will obey the hands-free theme:

There’s no remote, no joystick, no nothing. It’s just the person the body, hands free interactive games experiences.

Lawson and collaborators Ben Chang (associate professor of arts and GSAS co-director) and Silvia Ruzanka, artist and RPI lecturer, debuted one of the games – Broken Breakout – during the Gamefest, the annual showcase of student-designed games hosted at Rensselaer. The game is a Kinect twist on the classic “Breakout.” That’s a video of Broken Breakout at the top of this post. Here’s how it’s explained by its creators:

While the interface for the original game consisted of a small knob, here one plays through the movement of the whole body. Cascading balls pour out of the bricks, as they are broken, filling up the screen and quickly overwhelming the original rules and purpose of the game. New interactions emerge as the player wades through the piles of rainbow-hued debris, scooping and pushing masses around.

Curious about how you build a video game, I asked Lawson a little bit about went into the process. In the case of the Hands-off Arcade, Lawson said the process is part creation and part integration.

We come up with the idea – how the game will work, how it will look, how it will sound, how it will interact with Kinect – that’s all built from scratch. But a lot of the things that we use aren’t build from scratch – the graphics drawing engine, the physics engine, OpenNI and NITE (a natural user interfaces)- all of these components are open source drivers and libraries that we use as pieces in a game that we design.

In other words, the vision for the game is creation, but the mechanics integrates existing software drivers and libraries – packaged sections of computer code that are available for all the world to use in performing specific tasks.

For example, the games employ a “physics engine” which is a section of software that determines how virtual objects will interact (when a ball collides with an object, will it bounce away, or break the object into pieces?). Similarly a “graphics engine” allows the designers to input information about graphic elements.

Our graphics Engine – OpenGL – talks directly to the hardware of the graphics card. When you say, ‘I need to draw a polygon here,’ you say ‘here’s the information about a polygon, these are the locations for the vertices, this is the style, this is the texture, here’s where the camera is, focal length of the camera, go draw this for me and put it here on the screen.’

The team have one other game  – Missle Command – in the bag, and are working on a few others. One game they are building, at the request of the Saratoga Arts, is a spinoff of a website interface “B-Flat.” The original website interface allowed users to mix video snippets of performances in the key of b-flat major to create an entirely new composition. The new version “B-Flat 2.0,” will fit the hands-free theme.

Lawson said the team hope the games they are creating for Hands-off Arcade are ”as much art project as video game.”

They’re kind of subversive in that we’re not really adhering to cannonical game play and themes: there’s no high score list, there’s no saving the princess. We’re sort of using a gaming format to explore ideas, artistic themes, or finding out what you can do.

The end result may not appeal to hard-core gamers, but it does have the makings of a good time on a fun night.

Having watched a lot of people play these things, they kind of understand that this is just here to be an experience – there’s no anxiety of ‘I’m terrible at this game,’ because you can’t really win, you can’t really lose. … It’s just to play and have fun.

Earlier this year, the Center for Architecture, Science, and Ecology (CASE) received a 2011 R&D Award from the American Institute of Architects for one of their newest research projects – the Solar Enclosure for Water Reuse. Here are a few thoughts from the award announcement:

According to the World Health Organization and UNICEF, approximately one in eight people lack access to safe drinking water. In the United States, the building industry alone consumes 12 percent of all water withdrawals, and another 49 percent of water is used to create energy to power the built environment, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In the face of such overwhelming evidence, the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology—a partnership between Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute—developed a prototype that conserves energy and uses solar energy to passively filter graywater. And the system isn’t stashed in the basement or hidden from view. Instead it takes the unexpected form of a glass façade.

Sounds about right. The CASE invents materials that incorporate systems – like generating electricity, gathering water, treating sewage, or filtering air – directly into building materials for roofs, walls, windows and interior partitions. Their signature is an elegant solution that, as the award announcement recognizes, puts sustainability front and center in design.

I recently had a chance to visit the lower-Manhatten offices of the CASE in its lower-Manhattan offices (co-hosted by Rensselaer School of Architecture and architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in the SOM offices on Wall Street). Their space is sort of half-office/half-lab and it was peppered with interesting prototypes and projects in progress. It was fun to see so many of their inventions in one space doing their thing.

For example, the picture at the top of this post shows one of the prototypes - an ”Integrated Concentrating Dynamic Solar Facade” -undergoing tests in an office window. The solar facade - which can be used for windows or facades - contains solar concentrators that track the sun and simultaneously generate electricity, gather heat from water circulating through the system, and diffuse light coming into a building.

In the top picture,  you can see two working solar energy collectors on the right - a photovoltaic cell is fixed at the apex of the glass and flexible tubing channels water through the system, and on the left is a sensor measuring the amount of light entering the system.

This closeup shot (above) shows the frontside of a collector with the lens and flexible water tubing surrounding the photovoltaic cell. As they refine their design, CASE researchers are gathering data on how much heat and eletricity the system gathers, as well as how much heat is lost as it travels through the system.

CASE Director Anna Dyson said CASE researchers are “expert integrators.”

We solve problems. We do something different because what’s out there isn’t good enough. We look at what’s out there that we incorporate in the solution, and we integrate it with building materials.

CASE not only develops building materials, it also trains an up-and-coming generation of architects to look across disciplines to solve problems. Center director Anna Dyson said that while CASE students (a mix of undergraduates, master’s and PhD candidates in architecture) are specialists within their field, “their specialization is in integration.”

Our students are expert integrators, expert organizers, they have taken science, they’ve taken math, social sciences, art, and architecture. We see very few people in the field who have the ability to integrate that our students are developing.

For example, when CASE built the first generation solar facade unit (several successive generations have since been built), they pulled together an existing mirror tracking system, a furnace lens, and the perfect solar cell for the job, but at the time, the solar cell was only available for satellites. Since they couldn’t buy it, a professor on Rensselaer’s campus actually had to build their first solar cell by hand. The CASE researchers had to consider: Would that cell eventually be available for commercial use? Would it be affordable at that point? Were better options coming down the pike?

Dyson and CASE Assistant Director Jason Vollen will also tell you that the lack of such “blue fingers” abilities in the building field is an impediment to greater integration of sustainability in building materials. As Vollen put it:

If you don’t have policies, and you don’t have the codes, then you can’t have the progress.

Dyson and Vollen have a lot to say on the subject, and they hope their insight and experience will play into a longhaul revolution in the philosophy of the building professions.

But please, let me not neglect my guests - there’s more to see.

CASE is working on a “phytoremediation system,” a modular wall unit that supports common house plants capable of filtering “off-gas,” the toxins emitted by modern furniture, office equipment and finishing materials in office environments (that’s Vollen in front of a prototype unit). In another example of integration, CASE researchers came up with the idea for the system, and then combed existing research to determine which plants best filter formaldehyde (English ivy, as it happens).

The plants create oxygen, while bacteria growing on their exposed roots break down volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and other pollutants. CASE estimates that the system is capable of lowering VOC levels found in typical offices by more than 80 percent, reducing the load on mechanical ventilation systems, and cutting HVAC energy consumption by up to 60 percent.

Another idea in the works combines knowledge of ceramics, and thermochromatic coatings with the particular sun position and climate in a given location to produce the “high performance masonry system.”

You can see some of the sample bricks (mounted on a conference room wall) on the left. An architect designing a building can choose from a palette of bricks to tune the absorption or diffusion of heat on a particular building based on the climate, orientation and even height of an exterior wall. As with the integrated solar facade materials, water can be piped past the underside of the bricks to heat or cool it as part of the domestic heat/hot water system of the building.

CASE regularly earns accolades and awards for their work – the phytoremediation system won a 2009 AIA R&D Award to mention one – and, while they’re not interested in commercialization, they do hope to see each of their inventions installed in an actual building - which is called a “test bed.” One of the advantages of the partnership with SOM is that they are regularly approached by architects working on a project that holds potential as a test bed for the CASE designs. It is a long road from drawing board to prototype to installation in a real live building, but, from what I hear, the destination is in sight.

"black is the nite (Round the World)" a stop motion animation by Pamela Sunstrum on exhibit at MoCADA

Just a few weeks ago I was writing about fractals as part of a post about a piano concert featuring Debussy’s La Mer. Wouldn’t you know it, they’ve cropped up again.

An exhibit opening this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) in Brooklyn - with ties to Rensselaer - will feature several fractal-based works. The exhibit is titled “Feed Your Head: The African Origins of the Scientific Aesthetic,” and, according to the description on the MoCADA website, the works featured  “join together two visual artists with a physicist and ethnomathematician to explore the aesthetic convergence of science and art.”

The ethnomathematician is none other than Rensselaer Professor Ron Eglash. Eglash, a professor in our Department of Science and Technology Studies, has made fractals a keystone in his efforts to show minority students the cultural relevance of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields.

Here’s how Eglash summarizes his work:

Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves across several scales. They were first thought to be purely mathematical abstractions, but in the 1970s mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot realized that many natural structures have this “scaling” characteristic: trees are branches of branches, rugged mountains have peaks within peaks, clouds are puffs of puffs, and so on. Fractals became an exciting new frontier for mathematical models of nature.

In the late 1980s I noticed that aerial photos of African villages also tend to be fractals: circular houses in circles of circles; rectangular houses in rectangular clusters. A Fulbright research fellowship allowed me to spend a year travelling in Africa interviewing the artisans who created these structures. I found that these patterns were intentional and that the repeating process of shrinking scales— what mathematicians call “recursion”—often symbolized recursive cosmologies, the infinite regression of kinship, the self-generating power of life, or other concepts that mapped fractals to spiritual and social ideas. Fractals showed up not only in African architecture, but also in African textiles, sculpture, hairstyles, metalwork, and many other designs.

Thanks to funding from the National Science Foundation, we have developed educational software that allows K-12 teachers to use these African fractals in the classroom (www.csdt.rpi.edu). Architects working in Africa have also started to look at fractal structure for contemporary buildings, and there is even an entire university campus planned for Angola which will have a fractal layout.

As for the project, Eglash said:

We began our discussion with a focus on the work of Sylvester Gates, who has been visualizing his supersymmetry theory with some diagrams he calls “adinkra,” after the Ghanaian print tradition. I described some of the work I had been doing on adinkra in Ghana, and Kalia Brooks, the curator, suggested we make adinkra the central theme.

A few months later Taena Richards contacted me and asked about an adinkra symbol she had seen called “linked hearts.”

Eglash says this pattern is slightly different from a traditional Ghanaian adinkra pattern (in which the hearts would be more circular, reflecting the actual shape of an animal heart). Nevertheless, he used her version as the basis for a fractal which he returned to her:

The finished piece is a collaboration between Eglash, theoretical physicist Sylvester  Gates, and artists Pamela Sunstrum and Richardson (full disclosure – “black is the nite (Round the World) ” - the image of which opens this post - is not one of the pieces on which he collaborated, although it will be featured in the exhibit).

As part of the exhibit, on December 6, MoCADA will offer a workshop for educators on using African arts to teach STEM, run by Rensselaer Professor Audrey Bennett.

The exhibit will be on view November 17, 2011 to February 25, 2012.

Usually when I write about fractals, it’s in relation to the work of Ron Eglash – Rensselaer professor of science and technology studies - on African fractals as part of efforts to engage minority students in the “STEM” fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

But this time around, it’s about music. Piano music. And a concert to be performed at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) on November 9.

The concert will include performances by Rensselaer and College of Saint Rose students and faculty, and the program - a mix of contemporary and classical pieces - begins with Claude Debussy’s famous composition La Mer, depicting oceanscapes from the French seacoast and the English Channel.

The concert is titled Piano Waves (for more information , check out this news release). Some pieces will enlist four grand pianos playing simultaneously. And by way of illustration, Michael Century - Rensselaer professor, performer and concert organizer - proposed the image at the top of this post.

The image adorned the cover of an early album recording of La Mer, and is taken from a Japanese print. This much I knew when I sent the image to our web designers to accompany the news release.

Within hours of publishing the release on our website, I received this message from  Robert W. Messler, Jr., a Rensselaer professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering:

I noted with interest the painting chosen to help promote the forthcoming piano concert at the EMPAC. It is “The Great Wave” by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusia (1760-1819).

Many at RPI would probably by intrigued to know that the great French mathematician Benoit Madelbrot, father of fractal geometry and the mathematics of chaos, spotted fractals in this painting, made more than 150 years before the phenomenon was recognized.

Note that at the crest of the great curling wave are smaller curling waves, with still smaller curling waves at their crests. The similarity to what has become the most recognized symbol of fractals (as attachment) is astounding. Mandelbrot refers to what Hokusia captured in his “Great Wave” as self similarity.

Personally, I think this is worth being to the community’s attention. We are, after all, mostly nerds.

Respectfully,

Robert W. Messler, Jr., ’65/’71
Professor, MS&E

Agreed. And let this stand as a “Rensselaer moment” in the connection between science and art. Thank you Prof. Messler!

Today, the final mission of the NASA Space Shuttle launched from its hot, hazy home at the Kennedy Space Center. Millions of people around the world watched in wonder as the iconic bullet-shaped Atlantis bursts through our atmosphere in a shower of rocket-fueled smoke, fire, and power. Rensselaer was there today, as it was from the very beginning.

Back in 1958, an intelligent young World War II veteran and RPI graduate helped form what we now know as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration or simply NASA. George Low, Class of 1948, would become the NASA Chief of Manned Space Flight. At this time, the concept of a man in space seemed at best an extremely distant possibility and at worst a death mission. But, space science was quickly advancing. The spidery Russian Sputnik 1 was already orbiting around the globe along with the similar Sputnik 2 with the first (briefly) living passenger sent into orbit, Laika the stray dog.

Under Low’s direction, the idea of sending an American into space went from being nearly impossible to accomplished in just three years when astronaut Alan Shepard was rocketed up in Freedom 7 as part of Project Mercury. Low would go on to be an integral part of the planning for not only Project Mercury, but also Gemini and Apollo.

Later, just weeks after Neil Armstrong stepped off Apollo 11 in 1969 with Low watching from Mission Control, Low was named as one of three NASA Deputy Administrators. In that role, he helped take the program from that first step and toward the “giant leap for mankind” with the early development of the Space Shuttle.

And Rensselaer’s involvement in the shuttle by no means ends with Low. Class of 1987 graduate Richard A. Mastracchio truly put his electrical engineering degree to work as an astronaut aboard both Space Shuttle Atlantis and Endeavor.

Outside of NASA, many RPI graduates and faculty have been involved in the many missions of the retiring space shuttle. Some of these achievements may have been lifesaving.

In 2003, our terahertz expert Xi-Cheng Zhang used his terahertz technology to uncover small defects in the foam that encased the Space Shuttle. The technology, which uses these unique rays to create an image without destroying the materials it is analyzing, uncovered potentially dangerous air bubbles and separations in the material. The information helped NASA continue to improve the material design. Such knowledge is essential as NASA investigators believe that the Columbia Space Shuttle crash may have been caused by defects in the foam insulation.

In 2009, professors Peter Wayner and Joel Plawsky watched as their experimental heat transfer system was rocketed to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. The project, called the Constrained Vapor Bubble (CVB), is yielding important insights into the nature of heat and mass transfer operations that could lead to the development of new cooling systems for spacecraft and electronics devices.

RPI nanotechnology innovations have also been rocketed aboard the shuttle. In 2009, professors Linda Schadler and Thierry Blanchet developed two different types of experimental nanomaterials that were blasted into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Atlantis and later mounted to the exterior of the ISS hull. On the hull, they are exposed to the cold temperatures and strong radiation of space. Both materials are forging new ground in the effort to develop better and stronger materials for space and air craft design.

And today, RPI is once again a part of history as experiments from our own Cynthia Collins, Joel Plawsky, and Jonathon Dordick make their journey into the universe aboard the final mission of the shuttle. The experiments seek to understand how the environment of space impacts the growth of potentially deadly bacteria. A lot more information here.

In the end, experiments such as these could be vital to the next wave of innovations coming out of NASA post-Shuttle. If long-term space flight or extended stays aboard the ISS become the next possibility for discovery, a deep understanding of how to keep people safe and healthy in space will be essential.

I know many examples of RPI involvement in the shuttle are not mentioned here. Surely, hundreds of our faculty, students, and alumni have touched, molded, welded, and crafted so many aspects of this historic vessel. As the shuttle makes its last journey, we at RPI can all feel proud of our role in that journey and can look forward to our guaranteed involved in the next journey that NASA will have in store for us.

Our friend Benita Zahn visited campus earlier this week, to meet chemical engineering professor Wayne Bequette and learn more about his fascinating work on creating control systems for an artificial pancreas. The resulting news story is above.

Bequette started his career in the oil refinery industry, where he was in the business of creating complex computer code. This code was the brain that modeled and controlled the advanced diagnostics equipment responsible for monitoring the chemical state of oil as it moved through the labyrinth of refinery machinery.

His pursuits led him to academia. Bequette openly admits that, as a chemical processing guy, he never imagined he would end up doing biomedical engineering research. But serendipity strolls a subtle path. Several years after joining the Rensselaer faculty, a conversation with a colleague (who was an anesthesiologist) set off the proverbial light bulb over Bequette’s head. He saw an opportunity to apply techniques he used in the oil industry toward a new application: modeling blood pressure.

One thing led to another, and he ventured into applying these same techniques toward the challenge of creating an artificial “closed-loop” pancreas. The device, still several years away from being commercialized, pairs a glucose monitor with an insulin pump. For those suffering from Type 1 diabetes, also called juvenile diabetes, the closed-loop system holds the potential to remove much of the guesswork and estimation from the constant care they must take to maintain and live with the disease.

As you can imagine, there’s no shortage of excitement surrounding Bequette’s work. It’s a great project, and it’s a crystal clear example of how basic research can yield new technologies that better our lives in fundamental, meaningful ways.

Read more about Bequette’s research in our recent story here.

This spring, Rensselaer saw the first full class of students in its Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences (GSAS) program (20 students) cross the dais and take their degree. It’s a milestone worth celebrating and, as if on cue, GSAS has been generating a buzz of activity of late.

Today, the Berkshire Eagle reports that RedCandy Games, founded by Rensselaer student Julian Volyn, has just released its first video game, Tic, on XBOX Live Indie Marketplace. The article focuses on Justin Burdick, a Rensselaer graduate, and Volyn’s former RPI roommate, who contributed to the graphics of the game (Rensselaer students Zach Lynn, Trevor Zettersten, Ivy Kwan, Jeff Danis, Evan Weinberg were also on the team that created the game).

Burdick was on the student team that created Tic (pictured above) and Yamada Box Legend, the top two prize winners at this year’s GameFest.

Last week, Lee Sheldon, co-director of the GSAS program and a professor of language, literature and communication, released a new book on the lessons game design can lend to education. The Multiplayer Classroom, Designing Coursework as a Game lays out a classroom based on principles of game design created to motivate and lead players through the game. Students in the “multiplayer classroom” solve “quests,” work in “guilds,” and rack up “experience points” (which are translated to a grade) as the semester progresses.

It’s more than just theory, Sheldon runs his own multiplayer classroom in his work as a professor at Rensselaer, and says that the results speak for themselves.

“The average class grade went from a C to a B, using the same materials. Attendance is now near perfect. People come early and work – even if they don’t have an assignment – on various quests before the class.”

GSAS will keep rocking through the summer as Rensselaer hosts high school students in a two-week residential enrichment program on the fundamentals of video game creation. Students in the program learn about the technical and creative sides of games, and then have a chance to brainstorm game ideas and ultimately, design their own game from start to finish.

Well, Rensselaer resident nanotech expert and professor Linda Schadler helps put this quandary in perspective. In her Academic Minute, which aired today on NPR affiliates all across the country, she tackles the topic of nanoparticles, why they’re strange, and why they’re very important.

You can listen to the stellar 90-second piece at this site. The local NPR affiliate, WAMC Northeast Public Radio, launched its Academic Minute segment last year to great success. What started as a regional endeavor is now making waves nationally.

The transcript of Schadler’s Academic Minute is below:

We see composites – a mixture of two materials – in our skis, tennis racquets, airplanes, and cars. New composites made from nanoparticles and plastics may soon be improving electricity transmission, increasing the efficiency of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), and helping make computers even tinier.

A billion nanoparticles can fit on the head of a pin. They are so small, that they don’t scatter much light. That’s what zinc oxide sunscreen is no longer white – it has nanoparticles in it now.

That means that if you add nanoparticles to a clear plastic, you can give it new properties, but maintain the transparency. Think scratch-resistant, transparent coatings on your cars and glasses.

If you think about the surface area of a pin, and then the surface area of a billion particles, you can start to understand why composites made from tiny particles are so different. They have a huge amount of surface area. The composite is essentially made completely out of surfaces.

By engineering those surfaces, we are making materials that can be stretched twice as far before they break, without decreasing their stiffness or strength.

We have also made nanocomposites that can handle 50 percent more electric field, or last 100 times longer under electric field before failing.

These projects are a perfect example of why funding for fundamental research is so important. It has taken eight years of fund research to make some of these materials.

But some of them are finally ready for industry to being using them. And their potential impact is enormous.

For more on Schadler’s research, check out this blog post on “hairy” nanoparticles, this news story about nanoparticles in space, and – of course – this story about Linda’s leadership on the Molecularium Project.