The best of engineering on the web... January 2016

The best blogs, apps, and podcasts for engineers

Best of the blogs 

Starts with a bang! regularly tops ‘best of’ physics blog lists, and does so for a good reason. Theoretical astrophysicist Ethan Siegel began writing it in 2008 because of his passion for learning how the world works. He believes that this interest in “how it works, how we got here, and how we make sense of it all” is a story that is worth sharing and that belongs to everyone, not just scientists. 

Siegel shares hefty physics topics in an accessible way, easing you in with familiar concepts before stepping into more complex territory. Recent posts have included “Move over, Hubble: gravity itself is the best cosmic telescope of all” and “How exactly did Newton fail?” Each post explores fascinating topics that will satisfy your inner physicist and keep your grey matter firing.

With a whopping 1,000 articles on his blog, Siegel shows no sign of stopping. And with a whole universe of information to explore and share, why would he?  scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/ 

A plethora of handy apps have been developed recently to digitise the engineer’s toolkit. Vibration Monitoring for Android phones is one such app. Doing exactly what it says on the tin, it detects vibrations using an Android device’s inbuilt accelerometer, transforming your phone into a powerful vibration meter tool. Not only does it show vibrations on a graph in real time, but it also saves data onto your SD card and provides configurable sound alarms for vibration patterns. Originally designed to alert people to earthquakes while they slept, the app has become popular among engineers. User comments include one saying it proved “very useful and handy for supporting mechanical engineering tests” while another said they used it for testing vibrations in quadcopters. While the app may not replace higher-spec vibration test equipment, it will be a useful piece of kit for on-the-fly tests. Download from the Google Play store.

Perfect podcasts

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is a podcast “dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason, and the public understanding of science through online and other media”. One of the most popular science podcasts on iTunes, it has been enlightening the masses, and winning awards, since it began in 2005.

It is run by a seven-strong team of scientists and writers – including main host Dr Steven Novella, an academic neurologist at Yale University. The weekly show covers a mix of interviews, topical science news items and regular features, such as “the dumbest thing of the week”, a guess-the-noise challenge and “what’s the word?”, asking the audience to define terms. In a bid to make the podcast interactive, the team answer listeners’ questions and emails and post links to the stories and studies they have covered.

A well-produced and fact-filled podcast, it educates while avoiding being stuffy. Listen at theskepticsguide.org/