EP in the news

"NASA to go nuclear; spaceflight initiative approved," a Feb. 5 story on SPACE.com, quoted Professor Gerald Kulcinski about NASA plans to power space travel with nuclear power. In the story, he said student interest in the nuclear industry in general has increased, and he encouraged government to act on that interest.

A Jan. 10 story in the New York Times featured COE researchers' work in developing nuclear-powered nanobatteries for MEMS. "A world of wee devices seeks some batteries to match," extensively quoted Associate Professor James Blanchard about the research that he, Associate Professor Douglass Henderson and Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Amit Lal have conducted to develop the long-lasting power sources. NED, the fall 2001 issue of the ASME International newsletter for nuclear engineers, also featured the research.

Professor Roderic Lakes wrote, "A broader view of membranes," an analysis of recent discoveries relating to the negative Poisson's ratio in materials — including biological materials — with fixed-connectivity membranes. (Materials having a negative Poisson's ratio get fatter when stretched.) The analysis appeared in the Nov. 29 issue of the journal Nature.