Engineering & Urban Design
These are the five main stages of the Engineering Design Process (EDP).
What are Ask, Imagine, Plan, Create, and Improve?
A "100-year flood zone" means there is this exact statistical probability of a major flood occurring in any single year.
What is a 1% chance?
The rapid, unrestricted growth curve that the global human population has experienced over the past 200 years.
What is a J-shaped curve (or exponential growth)?
These common household items are used in low-cost cardboard prosthetic prototypes to establish functional pivot points for joints.
What are flexible straws (or plastic tubes)?
The foundational forensic principle that dictates "every contact leaves a trace."
What is Locard’s Exchange Principle?
If a city's power grid or energy system fails, these two critical infrastructure components will immediately shut down.
What are water pumps and communication networks?
Remote or developing communities often prefer low-tech sand filters because they are much easier for locals to do these two actions to.
What are maintain and service?
Electric vehicles initially start their lifecycle with this type of environmental disadvantage due to the energy-intensive manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries.
What is a carbon debt?
To simulate the movement of human tendons in a prosthetic hand, mechanical designers use this force applied through strings or wires.
What is tension?
Upon arriving at a fresh crime scene, an investigator's absolute primary objective is to accomplish this.
What is preserve the integrity of the scene (or prevent contamination)?
Civil engineers rely on this natural force to move municipal water from high-elevation mountains down to valley reservoirs without using electricity.
What is gravity?
If a prototype water filter clogs up immediately during a classroom test, an engineer should alter this variable before testing again.
What is the layer order (or material distribution)?
This smart grid technology allows parked electric cars to act as a giant decentralized battery system that can feed electricity back into a city during peak hours.
What is Vehicle-to-Grid (or V2G)?
A preliminary, physical working model built by engineers to test design concepts before starting mass production.
What is a prototype?
A fingerprint pattern that enters from one side of the finger, rises slightly in the center like a wave, and exits out the opposite side.
What is an arch?
This term describes the physical features, slopes, and elevation changes of a landscape.
What is topography?
The practice of engineering decentralized, low-tech systems that can be easily managed by local populations without complex imported parts.
What is Appropriate Technology?
The rapid transmission of a contagious disease through a crowded urban environment is an example of this type of population limiting factor.
What is a density-dependent factor?
In human anatomy, these biological structures transfer mechanical force from contracting muscles to move bones.
What are tendons?
The specific scientific study of unique friction ridge structures on human skin for the purpose of personal identification.
What is ridgeology?
The phase of the Engineering Design Process characterized by testing a prototype, locating failure points, and redesigning the setup.
What is the Improve phase?
To prevent catastrophic structural failure, civil engineers completely avoid building critical facilities like hospitals inside these mapped regions.
What are 100-year flood zones?
Through natural selection, the parasites and vectors that cause this tropical disease have evolved resistance to quinine and chemical insecticides.
What is malaria?
This historical medical achievement in 1980 marked the first time a human vaccine completely wiped out a global pathogen.
What is the eradication of smallpox?
Forensic anthropologists evaluate the closure of these fibrous skull joints to estimate the age of skeletal remains.
What are skull sutures?