Discovery

How To Make a Great Cupcake

/ 4 minutes of reading

With Michelle Kupiec ’89, interdisciplinary studies, Owner of Kupcakes & Co. by Meredith Purvis America’s craze for cupcakes is still going strong – and why not? The best bakers have pushed the boundaries of the cupcake to concoct dozens of colorful confections with new twists (bouffant icings and inventive garnishes) that can dazzle the eyes and delight the taste buds. It’s not as easy as it looks to make a truly amazing cupcake, however, and even for the most polished pastry chefs wrestle with perfecting this single serving of scrumptiousness. So we headed into the kitchen with Michelle Kupiec ’89,… Continue Reading How To Make a Great Cupcake

Discovery – Summer 2013

/ 10 minutes of reading

CENTER STAGE On a hazy day in Baltimore, Ray Hoff can tell you if the smog that you see is from the Midwest, from Quebec, or from Baltimore itself.Hoff, a UMBC professor of physics and senior science advisor to the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET), began his career at Environment Canada with two projects: studying the deposition of toxic chemicals in the Great Lakes and looking at particle concentration in the atmosphere using a laser technology called LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to take those measurements.When Hoff moved to UMBC in 1999 to become the director of JCET… Continue Reading Discovery – Summer 2013

How To Get Your Motor Runnin’

/ 5 minutes of reading

With Steven Storck ’08, M.S. ’09, mechanical engineering, UMBC Racing Co-Captain by Jenny O’Grady The call of the open road. The rev of the engine. Wind rushing through your hair. There’s simply nothing like it. Whatever comes your way. But is it possible to properly head out on the highway without appreciating the vehicle that carries you? For UMBC’s Baja SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) racing team, that’s no problem at all. Every year, the student-run team builds a new offroad vehicle from scratch, and every year they outmaneuver the competition in tests of endurance, speed and safety. (Last year… Continue Reading How To Get Your Motor Runnin’

Discovery – Winter 2013

/ 10 minutes of reading

PLAYING ITS PARTICLE Sixty-four million tons of dust and pollution blow across the oceans to North America each year – and our continent itself produces about the same amount on its own. Tracking those particles could prove crucial in assessing changes in the earth’s climate, but scientists have found it difficult to locate and quantify them accurately. Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, however, have devised a way to do so using two satellites to draw a three-dimensional picture of airborne particles. In a paper published in Science magazine, the team of researchers asserted that most of what travels… Continue Reading Discovery – Winter 2013

On the Road to Plutopia

/ 14 minutes of reading

Travels and travails play a big part in award-winning UMBC historian Kate Brown’s highly-personal approach to investigating nuclear power and nationalism. By David Glenn A few years ago, historian Kate Brown spent several weeks in a tiny cottage in an obscure corner of Russia’s Ural Mountains. She was studying the history of Ozersk, a secret Soviet city built in the late 1940s to house the country’s first plutonium-processing plant. Ozersk itself remains just as closed to outsiders in Vladimir Putin’s Russia as it was in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. So a cottage that Brown rented several miles outside the city’s… Continue Reading On the Road to Plutopia

Staging the Struggle – Photo Essay

/ 4 minutes of reading

Essays by Maurice Berger, Research Professor and Chief Curator at UMBC’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture. Click on any photo to enlarge. Return to Staging the Struggle. Ernest C. Withers Sanitation Workers Assembling for a Solidarity March, Memphis, March 28, 1968 Gelatin silver print National Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution This image from the African American photographer Ernest Withers—one of the most famous pictures of the civil rights era— stands as a tribute to the slain leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and a poignant reminder of the continued urgency of the struggle he died… Continue Reading Staging the Struggle – Photo Essay

How to Win a Blind Taste Test (With Science!)

/ 4 minutes of reading

With Josh Wilhide ’10 M.S., Mass Spectrometry Facility Manager On a hot summer day, there’s nothing quite like the perky fizz of a just-opened soda to keep you cool and caffeinated. As consumers, many of us are incredibly loyal to a particular brand – even to the point of being sommelier-level tasters of sodas. Many people can tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi blindfolded. But how does the hardworking human taste bud stand up to the massive data-collecting power of one of UMBC’s mass spectrometers? Josh Wilhide ’10 M.S., chemistry, can quench our thirst for this particular knowledge quite… Continue Reading How to Win a Blind Taste Test (With Science!)

Discovery – Fall 2012

/ 6 minutes of reading

EXPLORING THE BORDER When human beings have to be at a certain place at a certain time, they have lots of handy aids to do so: alarm clocks and watches, maps and GPS systems. Michelle Starz-Gaiano, an assistant professor of biology at UMBC, is fascinated by the question of how cells do the same thing. “Cells leave on time and get to a destination on time during development,” she says. “They get to the right places almost all the time and they don’t get lost.” What guides cells? One aspect of this question that researchers in Starz-Gaiano’s lab want to… Continue Reading Discovery – Fall 2012

Gray New World

/ 10 minutes of reading

Students in the Erickson School’s Project 2061 class have high expectations for technology and its power to meet human needs. Working across disciplines, they’ve created new possibilities for the future of senior care. By Dinah Winnick Photos: Marlayna Demond ’11. CAD images: Michael Mower ’12 Ashley Johnson ’12, MAgS (left), helped her team imagine the needs of “Ashley,” a 111-year-old former psychologist who loves to garden but struggles with dementia, diabetes and hearing loss. Abdulla Aljneibi ’12, mechanical engineering (right), inspired his classmates to design for “Abdulla,” an imagined 90-year-old man determined to live independently despite impairments from a stroke.… Continue Reading Gray New World

Search Engineers

/ 4 minutes of reading

British writer and scientist Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And for many of us, that’s exactly how the beeps and pings and connecting dings that keep our schedules, steer our cars to the right destination, and even maintain our bonds with family and friends over great distances seem to work. Like magic. But to the humans behind the technologies – including Silicon Valley-based UMBC alumni at Apple and Google – it’s anything but abracadabra. It’s a combination of hard work, entrepreneurial drive and visionary imagination at its geekish best. Let’s meet… Continue Reading Search Engineers

Gray New World

/ 10 minutes of reading

Students in the Erickson School’s Project 2061 class have high expectations for technology and its power to meet human needs. Working across disciplines, they’ve created new possibilities for the future of senior care. By Dinah Winnick It’s hard to imagine ourselves five years into the future, let alone 50. But one group of UMBC students has confronted this challenge head-on in search of inspiration for new designs to improve the lives of older adults. Their course, “Project 2061” was spearheaded by the Erickson School, UMBC’s newest college. Founded in 2004, the school offers undergraduate and graduate curricula that combine the… Continue Reading Gray New World

Discovery – Summer 2012

/ 10 minutes of reading

HOMEFRONT HELPERS During World War II, millions of Americans kept snapshots and letters from loved ones deployed overseas. In the last decade’s wars, military families have had many more options to stay connected: email, cell phones, Skype, and (when the Pentagon says so) Facebook. Thousands of military families also have acquired Flat Daddies: life-sized, laminated, waist-up photographs of absent fathers (and, less commonly, mothers). Flat Daddies, which were first marketed in 2003, have come in for a certain amount of ridicule. (Esquire magazine honored them in its “Dubious Achievement” awards in 2007.) But Rebecca A. Adelman, an assistant professor of… Continue Reading Discovery – Summer 2012

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