When thinking of humanity’s ability to harness wind energy, many people will conjure images of windmills from places like The Netherlands or Persia. But people have been using wind energy for far longer than that in the form of sailing ships. Using the wind for transportation goes back another four thousand years or so, but […]
When a fire breaks out in a high-rise building, conventional wisdom is that stairwells are the only way out. Lifts are verboten in such scenarios, while sheer height typically prevents any other viable route of egress from tall modern buildings. If the stairs are impassable, or you can’t reach them, you’re in dire peril. In […]
Rope-climbing robots are the stuff of engineering dreams. As kids, didn’t we all clutter our family home with constructions of towers and strings – Meccano, or Lego – to have ziplines spanning entire rooms? Good for the youngsters of today, this has been included in school curricula. At the University of Illinois, the ME 370 […]