Shane Choi is a mechanical engineering and trumpet performance student at Northwestern University. He combined his passions for music and building things by making interactive lamps from antique brass instruments while on break from school.
“‘It was a massive learning curve,’ Choi admitted.”
Amid worries about large-scale die-offs of honeybees, beekeepers are looking for more ways to monitor hive health. Enterprising engineering students from Illinois State University have found ways to listen in on apiaries without disturbing their inhabitants. Read more here.
In a story that is too familiar to too many people, Danya Sherman’s friend was drugged and assaulted while studying abroad in Spain in 2016. The George Washington University junior decided to do something about it, inventing the KnoNap: a napkin capable of detecting “26 out of the 40 most commonly used ‘date rape’ drugs” as part of a women’s entrepreneurship seminar. It looks like a normal napkin and can be used by both men and women. Read more here.
Over the summer, the Global Grand Challenges Summit convened in Washington, DC. Over the course of the summit, the Royal Academy of Engineering hosted a podcast contest. Bethany Gordon, a Ph.D. student from the University of Virginia, voiced the winning podcast. Listen to it here.
A team of seven University of Maryland A. James Clark School of Engineering undergraduates won first place and earned the top prize of $20,000 in this year’s National Institutes of Health (NIH) Design by Biomedical Undergraduate Teams (DEBUT) challenge for their efforts to develop low-cost tools to diagnose Alzheimer’s disease before patients show symptoms. Read the story here.