Engineering Matters

The first boats that harnessed the wind to skip over the waves may have been built 8,000 years ago. Several hundred years later, the earliest seaborne trading networks began to form in the Aegean and the Persian Gulf. Modern cargo shipping relies on ‘bunker fuel’ a thick, black sludge made from the dregs of the...

Island states are at the forefront of climate change. Rising sea levels mean more coastal erosion, overtopping of defences and salinification of land. More frequent and devastating severe weather events are disrupting everyday life and acidification of the ocean is impacting on fishing. It is happening now, not in decades to come. From atolls in...

In this episode we explain how one of the world’s biggest problems – plastic waste can be reused in state of the art, energy-efficient road-building products. Working with Cumbria County Council within an initiative called Adept Live Labs Shell will be publicly sharing the knowledge they are gaining in these lab trials, with the overall...

Ecologists on infrastructure projects have some new team members: Conservation dogs. Their superior olfactory systems mean that they can sniff out a plethora of protected species from great crested newts and water voles, to bats and birds. Critically these canine detectives can do this more quickly, accurately and safely than humans. Thanks to pioneering work...

Every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food are wasted. The waste occurs all through the supply chain, from the farm itself, all the way to the household. It represents enough calories to potentially feed every undernourished person on the planet, and there is an environmental cost to this. About 6% of all human greenhouse gas...

Every good superhero universe has its origins story. Hagerbach’s begins with Rudolf Amberg, looking to innovate and find new efficiency savings for his iron mine. So began a 50-year journey from testing equipment and explosives, to fire and tunnel safety simulations, and ever more creative uses for underground space. Ultimately the mining industry in Switzerland...

When people think of digital tools to help with engineering problems, they usually think of a 3D model or a computerised image, representing something that exists in the real world. Machine learning is not that.  What it does is completely alien to your way of thinking. It operates in such a way that is totally...

London is the world’s first national park city, with about 50% green coverage of its surface area. This is a legacy of the public and Royal parks, Victorian tree planting, and is something Londoners enjoy on a daily basis. Behind the scenes, major organisations and stakeholders are working to raise the profile of environmental sustainability. ...

For millions of years spiders have been spinning naturally occurring proteins into an incredibly strong and durable silk. By studying the anatomy of these arachnids, scientists in the UK have cracked the code to reassembling natural proteins creating a new alternative to plastic. Pioneering research company Xampla says that its supramolecular engineered protein is fully...

Since the end of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, humanity has focused its activities in the southern continent on science and research. To do this effectively, logistics are critical. To prepare for the arrival of its new ship, the RRS Sir David Attenborough, the wharf at Rothera Research Station needed to be replaced. The...

Preparation is currently underway for installation of one of the world’s longest fibre optic communications cables. Survey vessels are circumnavigating the entire coast of Africa determining the best locations for laying the cable on the seabed and bringing it onshore. At around 36,000km long it will provide connectivity to countries throughout the continent and form...

Why do we build? Why develop society? And who reaps the benefit? In this episode we look at the new interest the construction industry is taking in quantifying and appreciating social value. That difficult-to-define idea that has also enjoyed the recent attention of central government, with legislation mandating that projects and tenders take it into...

In a field a few miles southwest of the city of Lexington in Kentucky, a sheep is quietly grazing in the shade. This is a very special sheep. It has been carefully selected from a rare breed to control the vegetation at Kentucky’s largest solar farm. The practice is known as Solar Grazing, an environmentally...

In 2019/20 an estimated 693,000 workers in Great Britain sustained a non-fatal injury at work in Great Britain. The figure, which comes from the Office of National Statistics Labour Force Survey, represents 2,160 injuries per 100,000 workers.  The rate had been steadily decreasing for decades. This self-reported rate passed just below 4,000 per 100,000 in...

What is Net Zero? And how can we get there? Can we mitigate the damage of three centuries of fossil fuel-powered industrialisation, with three decades of new energy infrastructure? While Canada is rich in renewables and already produces 80% of its electricity using non greenhouse gas sources, it, like countries around the world, has a...