Cosmic Arrays
Back in 2008, Don Boroughs reported on the struggle of South African universities to meet government demands for more engineering graduates. The nation’s high schools were producing too few students qualified to enter engineering, a legacy of an apartheid system that deprived blacks of a math and science education comparable with that of whites. Meanwhile, industry was luring away engineering faculty by offering three or four times their university salaries.
While these problems haven’t disappeared, an international project dubbed the Square Kilometer Array has suddenly given engineering education in South Africa an unusual advantage, Boroughs writes in our cover story this month. A major component of what will be the world’s largest radio telescope array, SKA is engaging faculty and grad students in inventing new technology. “South Africa is now one of the world leaders in radio astronomy,” David DeBoer, an electronics engineer and astronomer at UC Berkeley, tells Boroughs. Engineering schools also are creating a pipeline of graduates with the right skills for SKA, and drawing students from countries across the continent where the array is due to spread.
Boroughs’s “Eyes on the Skies” and Pierre Home-Douglas’s companion story on the design of a telescope observatory – the most advanced in the world – on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, underscore the importance of engineering to big science. Among other challenges, engineers need to protect the Hawaii telescope from earthquakes, fierce winds, and extreme hot and cold.
Breaking new ground in biomedicine, engineering researchers are combining knowledge of the nervous system’s electrical circuitry with nanotechnology to develop tiny implants that restore health to damaged or diseased organs. Tom Grose reports on this emerging field of “electroceuticals” in our third feature, “Circuit Breakers.”
We hope you enjoy the October Prism. We welcome your comments.
Mark Matthews
m.matthews@asee.org