Singapore and the grand challenges of engineering

Shobana Kesava, Straits Times 3 May 08;

Cheap solar power

It is clean, free and will never run out. Even the tiny fraction of the sun's rays which strike the earth provides 10,000 times as much power as all the commercial energy humans use on the planet.

But less than 1 per cent of energy needs are met by solar power, which is six times more expensive than conventional energy sources.

Solutions: Overcoming the barriers to widespread solar power generation will require engineering innovations in several arenas - in capturing the sun's energy, converting it to useful forms and storing it for use when the sun itself is obscured.

In Singapore: Norway's Renewable Energy Cooperation will build the world's largest solar manufacturing facility here. The National University of Singapore (NUS) has projects to use new materials like selenium or diamond to make efficient, cheaper solar cells. A Nanyang Technological University (NTU) team is finding ways to use the sun's rays to split water cheaply to produce hydrogen, a clean source of fuel. Another is trying to produce fuel by duplicating the plant's way of using sunlight to produce food.

Clean water

Lack of clean water is responsible for more deaths globally than wars. Nearly 5,000 children die from related diseases daily.

Solutions: Inexpensive ways to remove salt from seawater. Desalination is costly and consumes a lot of energy. A new approach might be to filter out salt with tiny tubes of carbon.

In Singapore: NUS is working with China's Beijing University and Britain's Oxford University to develop purification systems that use sunlight and microbes.

PUB is working with commercial enterprises to test new technologies at its facilities. NTU has just opened the Nanyang Environment and Water Research Institute to boost research.

A*Star's Institute of Microelectronics has developed a small electronic chip with biological markers to test and analyse water quality.

Understanding the brain

Specific skills like playing chess may have been mastered by thinking machines, but general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI) remains elusive. Engineers think understanding living brains may change the way artificial ones are made.

Solutions: AI is already behind speech, voice and vision recognition software.

Progress is being made in developing artificial retinas - light-sensitive chips that could restore vision - and neural prostheses - artificial aids to the nervous system that treat hearing loss and stimulate electrodes to treat Parkinson's disease. Implants to read the thoughts of immobilised patients could send signals to an external computer.

In Singapore: A*Star's Institute for Infocomm Research has developed a brain-computer interface (below) to build a direct channel between the two, by implanting an electrode in the brain to capture nerve signals.

Greenhouse gases

The issue of carbon dioxide (CO2) as the primary cause of global warming cannot be swept under the rug but could be vacuumed deep underground or within the ocean. Sequestration captures the gas and stores it safely away from the atmosphere, where it warms the earth's surface.

Already plentiful, but little known compared to CO2, is poisonous nitrous oxide (N2O), whose release has been escalated by human activity. This greenhouse gas is 200 times more of a heat trap than CO2. Agricultural fertiliser is the major source of N2O which reduces the earth's protective ozone layer, adds to smog, contributes to acid rain and contaminates drinking water.

Solutions: Industrial smokestacks could be replaced with absorption towers that isolate CO2 and return it to plants for re-use, or pipe it away for storage in depleted oil fields or use it to help pump up the remaining fuel.

Engineers need to find ways to trap CO2 deep enough underground, where pressure will compact it and keep it from diffusing back up, or send it into the ocean to combine chemically with calcium, locking it away as rock.

Instead of letting nitrogen leak into the atmosphere as dangerous N2O, it should be plugged and converted back into nitrogen, which can be trapped in plants as a protein-rich food source. This must be done cheaply so food costs do not rise.

Better medicines

Personalised medicine for individuals.

Solutions: Tools to rapidly assess a patient's genetic profile, trace the tiniest amount of chemical or virus in the body, and collect and manage massive amounts of data on individuals.

Also, therapies that treat drug-resistant infections by identifying the precise bacterium or virus causing an infection, instead of using general antibiotics.

In Singapore: Researchers in the billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry and Biopolis are working feverishly on solutions. Scientists at the Genome Institute of Singapore are studying the genetic underpinnings of cancer. NUS has scientists finding out how the building blocks of fats can protect cells.

Enhancing virtual reality

Virtual reality attempts to recreate the actual experience of activities such as flying a plane or conducting surgery.

Solutions: Precision in the virtual world, which falls short most when it comes to the sensation of touch. Surgeons cutting through vital tissue should feel different degrees of resistance to the motion of a scalpel at different places along the tissue. Virtual tourism of real places could be possible as sites like Google Earth merge with reality games such as Second Life.

In Singapore:
Firms have come up with systems that work well in the virtual world. First Meta, for example, has created a credit-line facility for the online community.

Securing cyberspace

Electronic information flow is embedded in networks of nearly every aspect of modern life. Cyberspace disruptions could cripple everything from traffic lights and aeroplane routes to cellphones and e-mail.

Solutions: Methods to monitor and quickly detect any security breach and prevent diversion or alteration. New programming languages and better approaches are needed to authenticate hardware, software and data in computer systems and verify user identities. Biometric technologies like fingerprint readers could be used.

In Singapore: Government, universities and commercial enterprises are racing to raise and redefine online security levels.

Technology of the future to be more personalised
That's common theme of 14 top engineering challenges listed by international panel
Shobana Kesava, Straits Times 3 May 08;

IN THE 21st century, health care, travel and information will be made personal.

People could have individualised power and water sources, and medicines could be tailor-made according to each individual's genetic code, for example.

This is the common theme of the 14 top engineering challenges of the century, set out this year by a team of international leaders, comprising scientists, entrepreneurs and thinkers.

Those on the team include leaders from the American National Academy of Engineering and American Academy of Science, technopreneur Ray Kurzweil, biologist Craig Venter, inventor Dean Kamen and Google co-founder Larry Page.

One of only two Asians in the group of 18 is the head of the Institute of Bio-engineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore, Professor Jackie Ying.

'We have a world today which a century ago was unimaginable,' she said.

Planes and spacecraft were once made for flights of fancy, while just 20 years ago, Singaporeans would not have foreseen the reliance placed on cellphones and e-mail.

Prof Ying said engineering genius will take sufficient brainpower and funding.

'What we want to do now is catch the imagination of young people.'

She said the group's choices fell under four themes essential for humanity to flourish: sustainability, health, reducing vulnerability and the joy of living.

To Prof Ying, the most urgent need is carbon sequestration - trapping and storing carbon dioxide, a major cause of global warming.

'All we need is a global change of two to four degrees and we could all be gone,' she said. 'Policy makers have to jump in on this.'

At her institute, leaps are being made in the field of personalised medicine.

However, work must be done to change the mentality of how the world views medicine: It must be seen as worth the investment to study highly effective treatments which may not work across the board, but help only small groups.

Visitors to the site www.engineeringchallenges.org can vote for challenges they feel should be prioritised.