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Five Top Young Tech Innovators for 2018

For the past 18 years, MIT Technology Review has celebrated innovators under 35 who use their unique discoveries to become entrepreneurs, pioneers and humanitarians. This year, for the first time, the list includes more women than men and represents more nations than ever before. We want to highlight five of our favorites whose work will […]

8 Great Engineering Christmas Gifts For Kids

Wondering what to get your aspiring scientist or engineer this year for Christmas? Well fear not, because thankfully now is a golden age for STEM toys and gifts to inspire young learners to experiment, play and discover the pleasures of figuring out how things work. We like to support more people to get involved in […]

Weights, Measures And The Story Of The Kilogram

Star Rapid talks about the foundations of metrology and the special case of measuring how heavy something is. This lovely platinum/iridium cylinder is a kilogram. In fact, it’s the kilogram, as kept under very controlled conditions at the International Bureau of Standards near Paris, France. It forms the basis for the standard unit of mass, […]

Makers, Hackers and Geeks

A new kind of industrial revolution is taking hold in cities and towns all over the world. It’s a grassroots movement, empowered by individuals freely sharing knowledge and using the tools of digital manufacturing. Locally based but connected by the World Wide Web, it may be the best hope yet for revitalizing manufacturing economies and […]

The Engineer’s Bookshelf: Machinery’s Handbook

Although it’s now digitized on CD-ROM, Machinery’s Handbook still remains The Book to turn to for a vast amount of information relevant not only to machinists but also product designers, tool makers, engineers, inventors and hobbyists who want definitive information about how things are made with machine tools. Let’s take a closer look at its […]

5 Reasons To Rethink Autonomous Cars

We talked last time about five reasons why the advent of so-called “driverless” cars would be a great idea. But for those of you out there with a skeptical bent, we would like to present the other side of the story. Here then are the top five reasons why self-driving cars will be the ruin […]

5 Reasons Why Self-Driving Cars Will Create Heaven On Earth

In this first of a two-part essay, we’ll discuss some of the technologies of and advantages to self-driving, autonomous vehicles. This subject has been bandied about quite a bit over the last few years, and now of course Google is investing some very real money into trying to make so-called driverless cars a reality, so […]

5 Great Ways To Get Started In Design

Think about the products you use on a daily basis. Whether they’re physical products like laptops or digital ones like apps, we’re surrounded by innovative product design examples everywhere we look. These products represent the work of product designers. From a consumer perspective, we only see the end result and don’t know what took place […]

Will The Internet Of Things Affect Your Future Prototype Designs?

It’s a pretty cool name, the Internet of Things. Attributed to Kevin Ashton in 1999 while he worked at Proctor and Gamble, it’s used to describe the connected world we’re rapidly heading towards, a world in which everyday, ordinary devices carry RFID chips and other low-cost, embedded communication devices. These devices will share information in […]

New 3D Objects Make Learning Fun

Additive manufacturing and 3D printing have now been around for more than thirty years. Touted as heralding the advent of the third industrial revolution, desktop manufacturing promises to fundamentally alter the way that average citizens envision and create the objects that make up our world. Of course you already know all this. But aside from […]