When the I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis collapsed during the evening rush hour on August 1, 2007 killing 13 people, millions were stunned by the tragic scene. Images of cars, semi-trucks, and even a school bus, teetering some 115 feet over the mighty Mississippi River left many wondering, “Could that happen here, where I live?” In the days that followed, motorists around the country gave more careful consideration to the bridges and overpasses that they travel every day, which before had never garnered a second thought. While the specific cause of the collapse remains undetermined, most experts agree that some mechanical failure is to blame.

What is a skybox? The idea behind a skybox is that a carefully constructed texture, if mapped onto a cube appears like the sky and horizon from inside of the cube. A picture is the best way to explain. In the animation, you can see the skybox from both outside of the textured cube and from inside of the cube. When you place geometry inside of the cube, it appears to be inside of an environment.

Looking for Amelia Earhart and her aircraft in southern Kansas may seem as off-course as the ill-fated aviatrix, but researchers at Wichita State’s NIAR Crash Dynamics Laboratory were able to help solve the mystery 75 years after her disappearance.

In addition to conducting secure, proprietary testing in ergonomics and human factors for the nation’s aircraft and aircraft component manufacturers, engineers at NIAR used their state-of-the-art virtual reality techniques to recreate and analyze Amelia Earhart’s Lockheed Electra L10E aircraft ditching event in the Pacific Ocean.

The purpose of the project is to research and determine the technical merit or feasibility of CFD Co-processing for Unsteady Visualization. Co-processing remains a seldom-used method to post-process simulations both because of gains in computing speed and storage capacity, and the lack of reliable, robust automated flow feature extraction methods.

At first glance, this may seem like a familiar school child’s arithmetic problem, but it’s actually a highly sophisticated physics problem. Common sense and experience, of course, tell us that the new car is the better bet. A true scientific explanation, however, lies at the molecular level, beyond the perceptions of the naked eye—but not beyond the reach of researchers at Mississippi State University’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS).