10/28/2008
Hunting the Hidden Dimension
PBS NOVA

Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies Ron Eglash appeared in a NOVA episode about fractal geometry. Invented by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot in the 1960s and 1970s, fractals have changed the way we see the world and opened up a vast new territory to scientific analysis and understanding. Mandelbrot coined the term fractals to suggest "fractured" and "fractional," a nod to the new geometry's focus on broken, wrinkled, and otherwise "rough" shapes. Hunting the Hidden Dimension tells the dramatic story of a group of pioneering mathematicians who took Mandelbrot's invention from a mathematical curiosity that few took seriously to an approach that is touching nearly every branch of science and technology today, from cell phones to cardiac medicine to the study of tropical forests.

Watch the program featuring Professor Eglash, who appears in multiple times in Chapter 2: The Mandelbrot Set.

The hallowed halls of academia are not the place you would expect to find someone obsessed with evil (although some students might disagree). But it is indeed evil—or rather trying to get to the roots of evil — that fascinates Selmer Bringsjord, a logician, philosopher and chairman of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's Department of Cognitive Science here. He's so intrigued, in fact, that he has developed a sort of checklist for determining whether someone is demonic, and is working with a team of graduate students to create a computerized representation of a purely sinister person. "I've been working on what is evil and how to formally define it," says Bringsjord, who is also director of the Rensselaer AI & Reasoning Lab (RAIR). "It's creepy, I know it is."

Read the story.

From 1935 to 1975, just about everyone busted for drugs in the U.S. was sent to the United States Narcotic Farm outside Lexington, Ky. Equal parts federal prison, treatment center, research laboratory and farm, this controversial institution was designed not only to rehabilitate addicts, but to discover a cure for drug addiction. Now a new documentary, The Narcotic Farm, reveals the lost world of this institution, based on rare film footage, numerous documents, dozens of interviews of former staff, inmates and volunteer patients, and more than 2,000 photographs unearthed from archives across the country. . . . Its most important contribution might be how it transformed the way society views addicts — "as people suffering from a chronic, relapsing disorder that affects public health," says book co-author Nancy Campbell, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., who studies the history of drug addiction research. 

Read the story.

Housed in RPI's incubator center at its Troy campus, Ecovative Design got the top prize at last month's PICNIC Green Challenge in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where more than 230 'green' innovations from around the world were judged. Company co-founder Eben Bayer said the cash will help the fledgling company have its packing material product ready for sale starting next year. The 23-year-old, who graduated from RPI in 2007, has developed a lightweight, biodegradable insulation produced from mushroom spores. It is being marketed under the name Greensulate.

Read the story.

[The] research is part of a five-year, $18.5 million research project on LED smart lighting funded by the National Science Foundation. BU will receive $1 million a year. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and the University of New Mexico are participating in the project, which will work with corporations to turn their discoveries into commercial products. . . . E. Fred Schubert, a professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic and director of the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center, said 22 percent of the world's electricity is used for lighting, but it could be reduced to 11 percent if all existing lamps were replaced with LEDs. 'This is the only technology that can make a huge dent in electricity consumption,' he said.But for now, at least, it doesn't come cheaply. While a 100-watt bulb costs less than $1, an equivalent LED lamp can cost as much as $80.

Read the story, which was also covered by the Troy Record and the Times Union.
Read the Rensselaer news release.

The concert hall of the 21st century has arrived. And the building that encases it would be remarkable if it had only that. The 1,200-seat hall in the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute here (Empac, to its friends), which opened over the weekend, seemed a notable acoustical success on brief early exposures. . . . But in addition, the huge building, laid out on a hillside, houses a 400-seat theater with comparable versatility; two black-box studios, one geared more toward sound, the other toward sight; and space for rehearsals and other uses. And for their electronic and data needs, all these components have access to one of the world’s biggest supercomputers.

Read the story.

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is unveiling a new media and arts facility that features cutting-edge technology, a project that took $200 million and almost eight years to complete. The Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center officially opens Friday, kicking off a three-week celebration that includes video installations, musical performances and multimedia presentations. Officials at the nation's oldest technological university claim EMPAC is unlike anything else in the way it will put art and science together to allow for innovative new ways of learning, researching and creating.

Read the AP story, which was picked up by more than 50 outlets across the country, ranging from the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun to the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News. 
Read the Rensselaer news release.

[Shirley Ann Jackson, president of upstate New York's Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a past chairman of the NRC] said the long slump in nuclear training and research at U.S. universities has put the country's ability to design and build new plants in question, and she predicts the first to come online will likely be joint ventures involving companies from Europe and Asia, where nuclear power has a receptive audience. . . . RPI hired eight new faculty in the past two years and plans to add four more in the next three to five years, said Tim Wei, dean of its School of Engineering. . . . "We get e-mails all the time about internships and job opportunities," said Rian Bahran, a graduate student at RPI who started his studies in 2003, before there was talk of a nuclear renaissance and a surge of new enrollments.

Read the AP story, which was picked up by a wide variety of outlets ranging from BusinessWeek to Forbes magazine to the Boston Globe.