The time has come to make new year resolutions! You could aim to learn a new skill, technique or perhaps embrace a new discipline? How about starting a new collaboration with a researcher in a different field? Or expanding research beyond the lab into industry applications and policy recommendations?
If these ideas have crossed your mind, then your new resolution could be to embrace a multi, inter and/or transdisciplinary research approach so solve grand challenges.
If you had access to a 3D printer, what would you print? Something fun, something useful? How about both?
Alex Christopherson, a final year undergraduate student in Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London and David Samuel, an artist based in Park Royal Design Studios, collaborated to create a 3D printed sculpture that doubles as a microscope and allows you to see a 3D printed Queens Tower 100,000 times smaller than the real one! Engineering and art coming together to 3D print a sculpture.
New podcast alert!
Silicon-based solar panels are four times as efficient as plants at harvesting energy from sunlight. But they’re expensive to produce because the material they’re made of has to be very precisely engineered. What if we could make solar panels out of layered copper oxides (CuO/Cu2O)? These materials are cheap to produce, Earth abundant and fully recyclable.