All Features
Jim Benson
Untitled Document
From Dust Tracks on a Road, by Zora Neale Hurston (J. B. Lippincott, 1942)
The quote in the picture from Zora Neale Hurston does not end there; it finishes, “It is a seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.”
Zora was…
Chip Bell
Alice—of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland fame—had a very vivid imagination. Had she been on the job market today, she would have no doubt been sought by Pixar, Google, or Amazon. If you read Lewis Carroll’s classic, you know the colorful adventures of Alice’s wonder world. In the Tim Burton 2010…
Stephen M. Hahn, Anand Shah
Americans may be surprised to learn that many 21st-century medical products are still being manufactured using technologies commonly employed since the middle of the last century. These manufacturing platforms are not dynamic and can increase the risk of shortages, limit flexibility during an…
Emerson Grey
It’s Sunday night, and you decide to make a quick run to the grocery store. You grab five bananas—one for each breakfast of the work week. Then, at home, you immediately throw two of the bananas into the trash.
Who would buy fresh food and throw 40 percent of it away? Americans do, on average,…
Ron Cowen
NIST physicist Zachary Levine doesn’t cook that often, but when he does, it can easily turn into a science experiment.
Two years ago, after he and his wife had endured a week of under-baked cookies and chicken that took forever to roast, Levine wasn’t content to simply recalibrate his oven…
Kristopher Lee
ASM International is a nonprofit professional society focused on providing scientific, engineering, and technical knowledge to its members and the materials science community. In its education and experimentation labs, it regularly works with innovative inspection solutions that have the potential…
Shobhendu Prabhakar
The “mantra” for continuous improvement is to learn from our mistakes. Not only learn but also take necessary actions and come up with strategies to prevent the recurrence of the same or similar mistakes. It is true for humans as well as for businesses. In business, especially in the oil and gas…
Stewart Black, Patrick van Esch
Millions of Americans are unemployed and looking for work. Hiring continues, but there’s far more demand for jobs than supply.
As scholars of human resources and management, we believe artificial intelligence (AI) could be a boon for job seekers who need an edge in a tight labor market like today’…
Tina Berger
A manufacturing apprenticeship pilot program in Florida is taking a hybrid approach that replaces the traditional classroom element with competency-based, on-demand e-learning. It could help bring the apprenticeship career development tool into the digital age and be a breakthrough for…
Steve McKee
Is 2020 a bump in the road or the beginning of the end? That’s not a trick question. For some companies, the virus and lockdown have been inconvenient and annoying, but navigable. For others, they have been devastating. And the social unrest has troubled us all.
For nearly two decades, my firm has…
David English
As we all become accustomed to the ongoing restrictions as a result of Covid-19, an increasing number of Brits are looking for new and innovative ways to learn and develop. From home DIY to exercise classes, there are all kinds of weird and wonderful ways the British population is making the most…
Brookhaven National Laboratory
A team of scientists working at the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Brookhaven National Laboratory has designed an apparatus that can take simultaneous temperature and X-ray scattering measurements of a 3D printing process in real time, and…
Donald J. Wheeler
In past articles I have used graphs to provide perspective on how the Covid-19 pandemic is progressing around the world. In this article I shall update some of those graphs and use these historical data to make projections on what may be expected in the United States in the fall.
The worldwide…
Tom Taormina
Each article in this series presents new tools for increasing return on investment (ROI), enhancing customer satisfaction, creating process excellence, and driving risk from an ISO 9001:2015-based quality management system (QMS). They will help implementers evolve quality management to overall…
John Wenz, Knowable Magazine
This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
You hear a mechanical buzz. You look up, and there it is, hovering in the sky—four whirring rotors. Over your shoulder, you catch sight of someone tracking the flight and manipulating controls.
Drones, little flying vehicles with varying…
William A. Levinson
Face masks and respirators may well offer the only way to return to an even remotely normal living and working style in the second half of 2020, which means they will play a vital role in any kind of economic recovery. This article’s purpose is to discuss what we know about respiratory protection,…
James Anderton
Injection mold making used to be a relatively simple business: machine the cavities and runners, polish, cross-drill for cooling, then shoot resin. Today, however, relentless pressure for lower part cost and higher productivity have led to bigger, faster machines with molds to match.
Multilayer…
Steven Forrest
The ongoing pandemic will likely change, if not completely alter, many aspects of our daily lives. One facet that will significantly change is the way we work. After months of being in lockdown, the massive shift to working from home has proven to be effective in helping employees stay productive.…
Andrew Peterson
Collaborative robots are increasingly attractive to manufacturers that require flexible solutions for their growing product mix but may not have the scale of work or capital resources needed to justify larger investments in automation systems.
These collaborative robots, commonly referred to as “…
Benjamin Kessler
The full economic impact of the pandemic has yet to be felt. However, it seems beyond dispute that Covid-19 and globalization don’t mix well. Of course, all economic activity is suffering in this worldwide recession—but the global breadth of business may experience an especially acute shrinking…
Farhana Ahmad
Despite juggling competing priorities, building resilient systems and processes within their organizations continues to be top of mind for business leaders today and is anticipated to be so for the foreseeable future. As such, the first logical step is to turn to existing methods and approaches…
Lolly Daskal
In a recent survey, only 3 percent said they have confidence in corporate executives.
The news was equally dismal for others: 3 percent reported having confidence in government officials, 5 percent in reporters and journalists, 8 percent in small business owners, and only 11 percent in ministers…
Bill Bernstein, Teodar Vernica
Step into the factory of the future. Alicia, an operations manager, sits at her workstation viewing a digitally enhanced video feed of the facility, using cameras installed in strategic locations. Wearing safety gear, a maintenance engineer named Bob checks his tablet for the next machine to fix.…
NASA
On June 24, 2020, engineers completed the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s structural testing campaign for the Artemis lunar missions by testing the liquid oxygen structural test article to find its point of failure.
“The Space Launch System and Marshall test team have done a tremendous job of…
Richard Fendler
Job satisfaction is important to most people, and yet this can be a fairly nebulous concept that is tricky to achieve and also tough to measure in a meaningful way.
Luckily a number of software platforms designed to manage employee recognition have emerged in recent years, as outlined in this…
