Princeton, NJ - According to Catherine Zandonella of the Office of the Dean for Research, "Princeton geosciences professor Jeroen Tromp and his team have embarked on an ambitious project to use earthquakes to map the Earth's entire mantle, the semisolid rock that stretches to a depth of 1,800 miles, about halfway down to the planet's center and about 300 times deeper than humans have drilled. For the task, his team will use one of the world's fastest supercomputers, Titan, which can perform more than 20 quadrillion calculations per second and is located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee."

Hoboken, NJ - No matter how you look at it, college is an investment of both time and money. Payscale has posted their annual  College ROI Report, which covers "Best Value Colleges," "Majors & Careers" and "States & Categories." Once again the Stevens Institute of Technology makes the top ten of all colleges and universities, but ranked an unprecedented third place. Up from fifth for the past years, Stevens in Hoboken was calculated with a 20-year ROI of $841,000.

Princeton, NJ - Princeton University's School of Engineering and Applied Science released the Winter addition of their EQuad magazine, Volume 26, Number 2 and titled "Ideas to Impact." Dean Vincent Poor Ph.D. provides the opening message as the remainder of the magazine covers numerous articles on the university's researchers.

Check it out: http://www.princeton.edu/engineering/eqnews/EQN_W15.pdf

Washington D.C. - In a recent Brookings Institute report, Mark Muro and his colleagues discuss the potential of “advanced industries” and their economic renewal in the United States. Industries that invest heavily in research and development (R&D) and science, technology, education, and math (STEM) workers are considered "Advanced Industries." For New Jersey and the NJ Department of Labor, these industries are typically found in the advance manufacturing, technology and life sciences sectors.

Princeton, NJ - Five innovative projects have been awarded support through Princeton University's Dean for Research innovation funds. According to Catherine Zandonella of the Office of the Dean for Research, this fund is in its second year, the program enables faculty members to pursue bold new ideas. "Three projects in the natural sciences will receive $200,000 each over two years and will explore original, early-stage ideas that could serve as the basis of a larger research initiative.  In addition, two collaborations with biomedical engineering and neuroscience companies will receive $100,000 each for the first year; Princeton will match each company's contribution of up to $75,000 in the second year."

Princeton, NJ, December 16, 2014 – According to Princeton University’s Office of Engineering Communications, “As part of a project demonstrating new 3-D printing techniques, Princeton researchers have embedded tiny light-emitting diodes into a standard contact lens, allowing the device to project beams of colored light. Michael McAlpine, the lead researcher, cautioned that the lens is not designed for actual use — for one, it requires an external power supply. Instead, he said the team created the device to demonstrate the ability to “3-D print” electronics into complex shapes and materials.”

“This shows that we can use 3-D printing to create complex electronics including semiconductors,” said McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. “We were able to 3-D print an entire device, in this case an LED… We used the quantum dots [also known as nanoparticles] as an ink,” McAlpine said. “We were able to generate two different colors, orange and green.”

The contact lens is also part of an ongoing effort to use 3-D printing to assemble diverse, and often hard-to-combine, materials into functioning devices. In the recent past, a team of Princeton professors including McAlpine created a bionic ear out of living cells with an embedded antenna that could receive radio signals.

McAlpine said that one of 3-D printing’s greatest strengths is its ability to create electronics in complex forms. Unlike traditional electronics manufacturing, which builds circuits in flat assemblies and then stacks them into three dimensions, 3-D printers can create vertical structures as easily as horizontal ones.

“In this case, we had a cube of LEDs,” he said. “Some of the wiring was vertical and some was horizontal.”

To conduct the research, the team built a new type of 3-D printer that McAlpine described as “somewhere between off-the-shelf and really fancy.” Dan Steingart, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center, helped design and build the new printer, which McAlpine estimated cost in the neighborhood of $20,000.

McAlpine said that he does not envision 3-D printing replacing traditional manufacturing in electronics any time soon; instead, they are complementary technologies with very different strengths. Traditional manufacturing, which uses lithography to create electronic components, is a fast and efficient way to make multiple copies with a very high reliability. Manufacturers are using 3-D printing, which is slow but easy to change and customize, to create molds and patterns for rapid prototyping.

For the full article, click here.

New Brunswick, NJ, December 1, 2014 – According to Companies and Market.com, “Earlier this month, researchers from Rutgers University have for the first time harnessed the power of a supercomputer to develop methods that can be used to identify which materials have superconducting properties. The study, published in Nature Physics, offers new ways to study spin dynamics in non-superconducting materials, potential superconductive materials and those materials that pose barriers to conventional study, such as those with radioactive properties.”

Using millions of processor hours of a 27-petaflop Titan supercomputer to develop electronic structure algorithms, researchers have been able to model dynamic spin structure factors – i.e. the way in which electrons orientate themselves and correlate their spins within a material – of 15 iron-based materials.

The article continues, “The basic principle of superconductivity is relatively simple. When cooled to a sufficiently cool temperature, some materials exhibit the property of allowing electrons to flow with virtually zero resistance, allowing a wide spectrum of potential applications such as high performance magnets, power cables, superconducting fault current limiters and nuclear magnetic resonance equipment. Superconductors are frequently used by energy companies to enhance power grid performance. One leading company that uses superconductor technology is American Superconductor, a provider of large-scale (1MW and over) electrical equipment for the wind power industry. The company’s market cap was around $110 million, following a quarterly results update earlier this month.”

For the complete article, click here.