(no subject)
I found this on a web site talking about women and engineering.
In the last “Harry Potter” film, the boy wizard ate a plant called “gillyweed” so he could temporarily sprout gills and conduct a lengthy underwater rescue mission. Gillyweed is pure fantasy, of course, but a Case Western Reserve engineer is working with the firm Infoscitex, of Waltham, Mass., to develop artificial wearable gills for humans. The gills could let people remain submersed for several days. Fish gills efficiently extract relatively small amounts of oxygen from large volumes of water. So Case Western’s Harihara Baskaran and Infoscitex are designing a polymer membrane mask that will likewise reap oxygen from water. The mask would utilize thousands of minute channels created using the same techniques used for making computer chips. Given the gills’ obvious military uses, the Pentagon is funding the research. Indeed, it’s also funding research that could make yet another “Harry Potter” plot device a reality: an invisibility cloak. No word yet if the military’s also looking into flying broomsticks. -Thomas K. Grose
In the last “Harry Potter” film, the boy wizard ate a plant called “gillyweed” so he could temporarily sprout gills and conduct a lengthy underwater rescue mission. Gillyweed is pure fantasy, of course, but a Case Western Reserve engineer is working with the firm Infoscitex, of Waltham, Mass., to develop artificial wearable gills for humans. The gills could let people remain submersed for several days. Fish gills efficiently extract relatively small amounts of oxygen from large volumes of water. So Case Western’s Harihara Baskaran and Infoscitex are designing a polymer membrane mask that will likewise reap oxygen from water. The mask would utilize thousands of minute channels created using the same techniques used for making computer chips. Given the gills’ obvious military uses, the Pentagon is funding the research. Indeed, it’s also funding research that could make yet another “Harry Potter” plot device a reality: an invisibility cloak. No word yet if the military’s also looking into flying broomsticks. -Thomas K. Grose