In 2013, Jessica Mong arrived in the Bay Area with $100 in her pocket and a desire to enter the field of software engineering. Fast forward two years, and Jessica is now a software engineer with SurveyMonkey, a tech company that creates and designs custom online surveys. Jessica works on the billing side, writing code to ensure that customers can access and pay for surveys. Growing up in Nigeria, Jessica excelled at science and math. She received a scholarship to attend college in the United...

From robotic surgeries to driverless cars, as technology advances, robots are able to peform all different kinds of tasks. This means they could put some people out of work.

Structural engineering is a specialized branch of civil engineering that entails analyzing and designing structures -- things like buildings, bridges and even concert stages. Engineering is a big discipline that involves a systematic approach to designing solutions to problems experienced in the real world. There are many different fields of engineering, like mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, civil engineering, chemical engineering and systems engineering. And within these...

For almost half a decade, engineers have come to the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) Center to better understand how structures respond to the complex and destructive forces of an earthquake. Engineers can’t just wait around for the next earthquake to hit. Instead, they simulate earthquakes on a 20-foot by 20-foot, 100,000-pound, reinforced concrete shaking table.

Growing up in a small town in New Mexico, Elisa Quintana didn't even think about science. She grew up in a household that did not stress the importance of math and science. It was not until community college that she realized she liked math, and ended up transferring to the University of California, San Diego to pursue a degree in physics.

Researchers at NASA Ames and the University of California, Berkeley are designing what may be the next generation of space exploring robots. These robots are a type of structure known as a tensegrity structure. In tensegrity structures, rigid elements are not directly connected to one another by bolts or screws, and instead are connected by wires, cables, chains or a similiar string-like object. In this video, CaT Bobino explains how you can make a model of a tensegrity structure out of just...

Alice Agogino's lab at the University of California, Berkeley and Vytas SunSpiral's team at the Dynamic Tensegrity Robotics Lab at NASA Ames Research Center are developing what could be the next generation of space exploring robots. And these robots are inspired by a baby toy of all things.

Researchers at NASA Ames and the University of California, Berkeley are designing what may be the next generation of space exploring robots. These robots are a type of structure known as a tensegrity structure. In tensegrity structures, rigid elements are not directly connected to one another by bolts or screws, and instead are connected by wires, cables, chains or a similiar string-like object. In this video, CaT Bobino explains how you can make a model of a tensegrity structure out of just...

Hyper-realistic video games. They're made using a technique called 3-D mapping. In the real world, 3-D mapping indoors is much more difficult than 3-D mapping outdoors. The solution? A 3D mapping backpack.

In 7th grade, after reading a newspaper article about female engineers at NASA, Maria Bualat knew that was what she wanted to do when she grew up. Fast forward to today, and now Maria is a robotics engineer at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA where she develops robotics systems for space exploration. Her main project at the moment is Astrobee-- a free flying robot for the International Space Station. It’ll help astronauts in the space station and measure the quality of the air...

Alex Okita teaches computers to see like we see. He designs and develops tools and games for the Structure Sensor, an attachment for the iPad that can 3-D scan rooms, objects, and even people.

Amy Pickering is an environmental health engineer and works as a research associate at Stanford University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and at the Woods Institute for the Environment. She combines social science, microbiology and engineering to study ways people in low-income countries can access safer water and better sanitation. People living in the developing world are often exposed to higher levels of bacteria and other germs, usually because of contaminated...

Poop contains a lot of interesting stuff, including all kinds of microbes. Learn what these microbes do and how they can spread disease.

Here in the US, we take clean drinking water for granted. In many parts of the world, however, modern water treatment simply doesn't exist. This creates a major problem -- poop in the drinking water! Amy Pickering, a Stanford engineer, went to Dhaka, Bangladesh to observe how the residents collected water. The challenge? Build a simple, cheap device so that residents can easily collect clean drinking water.

Elijah Martin is a second year graduate student in the Developmental and Stem Cell Biology program at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He works in the laboratory of Dr. Deepak Srivastava at the Gladstone Institutes where he studies how the heart forms to try to understand causes of heart disease in order to develop therapies. In the lab, Martin grows heart cells in petri dishes, which involves mixing together different chemicals and nutrients to get the cells to grow and...

Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford University, has created a fully functional microscope out of waterproof paper that uses teeny tiny lenses to magnify objects. He calls it a Foldscope. The different parts of the microscope are printed on paper, which the user punches out and folds together. The Foldscope requires no power outlets and works with standard microscope slides. The Foldscope operates a lot like a traditional microscope in that it uses lenses to bend light in order to make...

Manu Prakash and his lab at Stanford University have designed an origami based paper microscope, called a Foldscope. The microscope is printed on waterproof paper. The user punches out the pieces and folds them together to create a fully functional microscope. It works with standard microscope slides and requires no external power to operate. You simply hold the Foldscope up to a light source (like the sun) and look through the salt grain-sized lens to view the sample on the slide. The high...

Quantum physics, Einstein’s theory of relativity and atomic clocks that are accurate to one billionth of a second -- all of these are crucial in allowing your smartphone to pinpoint your precise location almost anywhere on Earth. It's called the Global Positioning System, or GPS. The GPS receiver in your smartphone uses trilateration — a more complex version of triangulation — to determine its position on Earth. In drawings, trilateration is often illustrated in 2-D using circles. But since...

Meet Dr. Vi Rapp. She is a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She has a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and focuses her research on improving combustion and combustion systems. As part of her job she is working on designing a cleaner, more efficient cookstove. This Career Spotlight video is part of our Engineering Is: Saving the World with Cookstoves e-book, which tells the story of how Professor Ashok Gadgil and his team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory...

What is combustion? What happens when wood burns? Learn about the chemistry of combustion in this animated explainer. This Science Spotlight video is part of our Engineering Is: Saving the World with Cookstoves e-book, and is a companion to our Darfur Stoves Project video. The e-book tells the story of how Professor Ashok Gadgil and his team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed a cookstove to help internally displaced persons in Darfur. They are now working on designing a new...

Women living in the refugee camps of Darfur, Sudan must walk for up to seven hours to collect firewood for cooking, putting them at risk for violent attacks. Alternately, they must sell precious food for fuel. But researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have engineered a more efficient wood-stove, which is greatly reducing the women's need for firewood and the threats against them. This video is part of a series, Engineering Is Saving the World with Cookstoves. Find all of our...

Boyle’s Law describes the relationship between pressure and volume of a gas. Matt Wandell, a biologist at the California Academy of Sciences, demonstrates Boyle’s Law by placing a balloon in a small decompression chamber to simulate what happens to a fish’s swim bladder at different pressures. A swim bladder is a gas-filled organ in fish that helps them maintain their buoyancy. An animation in the video reveals how the gases inside the balloon behave in response to pressure change. This...

Matt Wandell is a biologist at the Steinhart Aquarium at the California Academy of Sciences. His work involves feeding the animals, cleaning the tanks and making sure everything in the aquarium stays healthy. Wandell also participates in research expeditions to survey and help restore coral reefs and collect organisms. He was a key scientists in developing a portable decompression chamber for fish that allows divers to safely transport fish from deep in the ocean's twilight zone up to the...