Categories
article Spring 2024

Apple Vision Pro: More Vision Than Reality

Apple’s bid to bring spatial computing into everyone’s daily life may be out of step with today’s technology. February 2024 marked the release of the Apple Vision Pro, Apple’s push for virtual reality to be a part of everyone’s daily life. However, professionals remain skeptical that this will be the product to crack the mainstream. […]

Categories
article

Trailblazing: The many legacies of Wisconsin Engineer’s first woman editor

Written by Mike A. Shapiro Our magazine’s first woman editor was also one of the first women to graduate UW–Madison with an engineering degree. When June Hartnell began editing Wisconsin Engineer in August 1944, she had a co-editor, a boyfriend with a red and white single-seat airplane, and the top GPA in the electrical engineering […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

Open-Source, Linux, and UW-Madison: A Story of History and Increasing Relevance

Niche and confined to technical discourse, Linux and open-source technologies shoulder the responsibility of maintaining life in the modern digital age. On a global scale, from governments to multinational corporations, world leaders invest in the immense power of one technology. This exceedingly powerful tool is known as open-source. Open-source computing makes Linux, an operating system […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

An Investment in the Future: The Legacy of the Washburn Observatory

143 years after being built, the Washburn observatory continues to offer a view of the cosmos to the public. See how dedicated engineering and innovative techniques contributed to the extraordinary lifetime of this UW-Madison icon. Outlasting its namesake, former governor C. C. Washburn, by over half a century and remaining scientifically relevant for decades after […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

Revolutionizing the Run: How the Use of Carbon-Fiber Plates in Long Distance Running Shoes is Making Runners Faster 

First included in running shoes in 2017, carbon-fiber plates greatly increase running efficiency. Most professional runners now use this technology because of the advantage it provides. Alex Marrione, a long-distance runner for the Wisconsin Track Club, purchased a new pair of Nike running shoes for training during his senior year of high school. These shoes, […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

ECB Resurfaces after a Flood… Again

The curse of the Engineering Centers Building strikes again! After two fires and two floods over the lifetime of the building, how will the community of the College of Engineering recover from yet another disaster? History repeats itself. That’s the saying. While usually applied to large-scale societal events – war, epidemics, famine, natural disasters – […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

C-Motive’s New Electric Avenue

Electric motors have relied on the same fundamental technology for nearly two centuries until two UW-Madison Electrical Engineering graduate students returned to one of Benjamin Franklin’s early designs. In 2009, Dan Ludois was a UW-Madison Electrical and Computer Engineering graduate student. In the laboratory of Giri Venkataramanan, he spent his Friday afternoons attending seminars held […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

A Peek at Recent Enrollment Trends in Engineering and the Humanities 

Machines or Mercurial Philosophers: Why Students Choose to Study the Former College enrollment trends ebb and flow with various societal, economic, and cultural changes. Within the landscape of higher education, two distinct areas often experience significant fluctuations in enrollment: humanities and engineering. While humanities programs explore the breadth of human expression and thought, engineering and […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

A More Connected Madison – WiHST’S Vision for High-Speed Rail in the United States

Live in Madison, work in Chicago, and get dinner in Minneapolis – the possibilities of high-speed rail in the Midwest are endless.  As winter break approaches, the stress of finals might finally dissipate for UW-Madison students. But as thousands of students plan to travel home for the holidays, the burdens of the semester are replaced […]

Categories
article Fall 2023

Oppenheimer and the Future of Energy

With the pop culture outbreak this summer surrounding Oppenheimer, more attention has been brought to research in nuclear engineering, specifically in UW-Madison’s Department of Nuclear Engineering and Engineering Physics. The release of Oppenheimer this past summer drove a pop culture frenzy. But more importantly, it increased conversations about nuclear engineering in the daily lives of […]