NASA's Curiosity Rover celebrates first Martian year

Photo from NASA/JPL

In my post on 24 March 2014 (Mars Rover landing explained), I wrote about the difficulties involved in a successful landing on Mars of NASA's Curiosity Rover. On 24 June the Curiosity Rover successfully completed its first year on Mars (687 Earth days), and seems to have celebrated by taking a 'selfie' (see accompanying photo).

So far, its mission is successful since it has already made one of the findings it was programmed for: to determine whether Mars has ever had conditions conducive to the development of life. After landing in August 2012, Curiosity Rover drilled into the Mars Gale Crater and found evidence of "essential elemental ingredients for life." According to the NASA press release:

"Analysis of these samples revealed the site was once a lakebed with mild water, the essential elemental ingredients for life, and a type of chemical energy source used by some microbes on Earth. If Mars had living organisms, this would have been a good home for them."

The link to the press release on NASA's website:
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/june/nasa-s-mars-curiosity-rover-marks-first-martian-year-with-mission-successes/#.U6mpw5R_uxq 

The press release lists other major findings that have been made in the past Martian year, which would be interesting for students to discuss and then to consider what the scientific and engineering impacts of each finding could be.

The link also has a video (2:34) with an update report. The narrator speaks very clearly and at a slow tempo. So it's useful not only for information, but also for listening comprehension.

For more information from NASA about the Curiosity Rover:
http://www.nasa.gov/msl and http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/

Here is the link to an article from Time magazine about the "anniversary":
http://time.com/2913065/mars-curiosity-rover-selfie/

The future of mobile phones

In my last post, I looked at the jetpack innovation from the Smithsonian magazine's annual festival, The Future is Here. At the same festival, one of the invited speakers, Joshua Bell - an anthropologist and curator of globalization at the Smithsonian's Natural History Museum - spoke about new uses for mobile phone technology, and what the future could hold in store. The Smithsonian website has an article about his presentation.

The link to the article:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/the-future-is-here-whats-next-for-mobile-phones-180951479/#FU30Gu5FRoTOyx3V.99

The main ways he sees this device changing our lives are:

1. Mobile phones will become part of us...literally.
2. Intelligent operating systems will make us question what it truly means to be human.
3. Mobile phone owners will learn how to rewire, turn off and repair their devices.
4. Open source technology will promote democracy, connect us globally, and allow us to improve our phones.

The article explains each of these aspects.

Students could be asked to brainstorm ways in which they envision mobile phones changing our lives in the future, or they could be presented with this list of 4 ways and brainstorm what each would involve. Since all of my students have fairly advanced mobile phones (in fact, "smart phones"), they know a lot more about the technology than I do. Many of them are interested in working in areas that will lead to future mobile phone development. So I think their ideas would be very interesting.

They could then read the article and compare their ideas with those mentioned by Joshua Bell in the article.

To work with the article itself, you could exploit the wide range of tenses used in the article: past, present simple, present perfect, present progressive and future. The use of the future tense, in particular, is with 'will' to indicate predictions.

Further focus on the article could incorporate these questions:

• Describe the first mobile phone.
• What aspects of this device from science fiction films are mentioned?
• What predictions for this device are made?
• What advantages and disadvantages of these predictions are mentioned?
• What further predictions can you make - and what are the advantages and disadvantages of those?

It is mentioned in the article that Joshua Bell is developing a new exhibition for the Smithsonian with the working title A Natural History of the Mobile Phone. As more information about this exhibition becomes available, I will be looking for futher interesting articles about this device for my engineering students.

The Future is Here - with Jetpacks

Photo from cnet.com

The annual Future is Here Festival took place in Washington, DC on 17-18 May 2014. The event is produced by Smithsonian Magazine (see my post of 11 May 2014), and is described as "an annual celebration and exploration of science, technology, culture, and the arts, all gathered around the exciting and elastic theme of 'the future.'"

The link on the Smithsonian webpage lists the speakers each day, with information about who they are:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/future-here-2014-180949696/

After the event, I checked the website to find news that would be of interest to my students, and it seems the main event was the demonstration of a jetpack inside the main building. The successful ride took 20 seconds, and indicates that the future of jetpacks is here - although expensive and with drawbacks.

The jetpack tested at the festival costs between $100,000 and $150,000, but is not yet available in stores. Only the parts are available on sale. This model has a total range of 1,320 feet (402 meters), a maximum height of 196 feet (60 meters) and a top speed of 80 miles (129 kilometers) per hour. Pilots need 100 hours of training in order to successfully fly the jetpack.

A video of the flight is on many websites; here's the one from the Smithsonian website (00:45):

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/watch-man-fly-jetpack-around-dcs-ronald-reagan-building-smithsonians-future-festival-180951496/


An article on HNGN (Headline & Global News) has an article with links to other news sources:

http://www.hngn.com/articles/31759/20140520/future-is-here-festival-features-successful-testing-of-real-life-jetpack.htm

All the sources have rather short articles and the same video. It is reported that an upcoming Smithsonian channel program will focus on the history of jetpacks, including current and future developments. When that becomes available, I will be checking it out for my students.

Coverage of the festival can be found at:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/peek-futures-present-live-coverage-smithsonian-future-here-festival-180951445/

The topic, and certainly the video, will be of interest to my students. They are already familiar with this device from many films - from James Bond to science fiction. Now it's real. What engineering student could resist it?

Smaller car for the city

Lit Motors car

Last week (23-24 May 2014) the 7th Austrian UAS Language Instructors' Conference took place in Vienna, Austria at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien. I not only organized the conference, but also presented a workshop on a topic that I focus on often in my lessons and in this blog: Integrating Reading and Writing for ESP Students.

I showed participants how I use a model text in the students' field of study to enhance students' reading skills, and then use the work we've done to relate it to the kind of writing they have to do in their studies.

The text I used was Lit Motors: Super-shrinking the city car from the BBC news website:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130630-super-shrinking-the-city-car

This is a text I've used with my robotics engineering and mechanical engineering students to guide them to eventually write a process description. But the work we've done has also helped to sharpen their reading skills.

After students have read the text, I have them find the parts of the article that explain:

• what the innovation is
• how it is innovative
• what it looks like
• how it works

These are features they would have to include in their own process descriptions.

As part of the description, I have them notice how explanations are made to make the information understandable to a non-technical audience. This is an ability that is useful for them to develop.

Examples of these explanations include:

• Imagine if you could cut the size of a car in half, ...
• ...looks like a hi-tech, streamlined egg on two wheels.
• A spinning disc has a tendency to stay upright, just like a child's spinning top. If you were ever made to hold a spinning bicycle wheel horizontally at school then you will have experienced the physics at work.
• ...it will legally qualify as a motorcycle, meaning it can split lanes and park in motorcycle specific spaces.

Further work includes noticing features of vocabulary that can be useful in their own technical writing. I give them the following instructions:

• Highlight words and phrases in the text that indicate change; that is, what the innovation has done.
• Highlight words and phrases that indicate comparisons; e.g., advantages and disadvantages.
• This innovation focuses on the idea that the car is snaller than other models. Highlight vocabulary that indicates size.

After we've worked on a number of texts like this (and others that have been posted on this blog), I have a clearer model for students to focus on when they write their own process descriptions. And having students notice content and vocabulary features of a text helps them to develop their reading skills in English.

These advantages make such texts very useful for ESP studies - in addition to providing interesting input for class dicussions about the innovation.