Eyes in the Skies
Posted on September 28th, 2017 by Mary Lord
After Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston with historic rains, engineering researchers Texas A&M University offered a quick, inexpensive way to survey the damage. They deployed drones – lots of them – in the biggest squadron ever used in an official disaster response.
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Tags: Drones, engineering research, Environmental Engineering, hurricane, National Science Foundation, Robotics, Science, search and rescue, unmanned aerial systems, Videos
Alice Zhai’s curiosity about Hurricane Sandy’s destructiveness led to an outstanding high school science fair project – and a collaboration with a NASA scientist that produced a journal paper outlining a new statistical model for better predicting the economic damage from big storms.
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, pioneered computer programming languages, discovered the first computer “bug,” and retired as the Navy’s highest ranking, longest-serving female officer in history. They even named a naval destroyer after her.
For years, America’s leaders have decried the poor showing of American students on international comparisons of math and science skills. But a new Department of Education report finds that many states outperform their global peers, including top STEM achiever Massachusetts. 
What does quality STEM teaching and learning look like? Where can teachers find resources? STEMx, a just-launched collaboration of 13 state STEM education networks developed by Battelle, offers a way for everyone from educators to policymakers to parents to share proven STEM techniques and tools.
Albert Einstein is no Caped Crusader. But as a comic book, his theory of relativity can pack as much punch as any superhero–at least in Japan, where students have learned math and science from manga (comic books) for decades. Now, a U.S. publisher has translated a host of these STEM comics, giving English readers access to manga versions of subjects ranging from calculus to biochemisty and yes, relativity.
Engineering rarely rates more than a passing nod in most K-12 science programs. A new report from the National Research Council could change that. Its sweeping recommendations for “next generation” science standards put engineering on a par with physics and other disciplines as key to meeting society’s most pressing problems while helping citizens make informed daily decisions.
Teacher layoffs nationwide threaten to make a bad STEM education situation worse, as more educators must cover subjects they are not certified to teach. A new survey by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that fewer than half the chemistry and physical science teachers in public high schools had degrees in those fields, with about 30 percent lacking certification in those subjects. 
