With both the Spring Meeting and Student Regional Conferences quickly approaching, YPAB is focused on preparing for a wide variety of programs and events. YPAB is also beginning the early stages of planning for the Annual Conference in Pittsburgh.

If you’ve participated in a Young Professional Advisory Board (YPAB) conference call recently, you are sure to have heard discussion about the status of the Young Professional Committee (YPC) by-laws. What you may not understand, however, is why YPAB is working to become a committee and what it will mean to you as a member or potential member of YPAB/YPC.

Since 2002, the South Texas Section of AIChE Young Professionals (STS-AIChE YP) has provided recent chemical engineering graduates the opportunity to participate in social, educational, and service events.

The DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) just released a tsunami of useful data – but one tool can help wade through some of it. NREL's new interactive geospatial app allows anyone to easily and accurately map potential renewable energy resources throughout the United States directly from a Web browser.

Along with advances in materials science – providing the world's strongest rope – and new kinds of wind-propulsion technology (kites), we may be about to see a second golden age of wind-assisted shipping. Watch the video in the upper right window.

Google is inviting students aged 13-18 to put their inquisitive nature to the test and pose their most pressing questions about the world around them and answer them with a scientific approach.

Register today for AIChE’s Online Career Fair and begin to search through job postings and apply for positions now, before the online event takes place on March 20-21, 2012.

Good news for stem-cell therapy: a paper reports that two subjects in a clinical trial have each safely received injections of embryonic stem cells into an eye.

Huber's research team can take wood, grasses, or any other renewable biomass and create five of the six petrochemicals that serve as the building blocks for the chemical industry. And he's just made another major breakthrough.

The AIChE Spring Meeting is the year’s key technical conference for practicing chemical engineers. A wide range of subjects relevant to the current needs of industry is covered. Plus, the Global Congress on Process Safety covers the critical needs of process safety practitioners.

Early Bird Registration Ends February 13!

Cubelets are a robotic construction kit according to the company that created them, Modular Robotics. Modular Robotics has put together a good video (viewable in the panel to the right) explaining how cubelets work.

What's curious about the video is that Modular Robotics uses a "Dutch Mountain Man" to explain cubelets. It's quite well done, actually, and somewhat funny. But I started to think about how peculiar this was, mostly because there are no mountains in the Netherlands to speak of.

Drew Berry, a 2010 MacArthur fellow, is a biomedical animator who creates scientifically accurate and stunning animations to illustrate how molecules in our cells move and interact. At the TEDxSydney conference, in May of 2011, Drew Berry showcased his animations that help researchers see unseeable processes within our own cells.