For Yewande Akinola MBE, engineering is all about staying curious, expressing creativity, and imagining the impossible. Yewande Akinola is an award-winning chartered engineer, communicator, and role model. In 2020, she received an MBE in the Queen’s New Year Honour’s list for services to Engineering Innovation and Diversity in STEM. Inspired to become an engineer owing to the intermittent water supply she experienced growing up in Nigeria, she now specialises in sustainable water management, wor...
Jan 12, 2021•35 min
With approximately 71 per cent of the Earth’s surface covered in water, the predictable and consistent electricity-generating potential of the oceans remains a largely untapped resource. In this episode of Create the Future, we speak to Sam Etherington, the engineer and entrepreneur behind Aqua Power Technologies Limited’s innovative wave energy generators. Inspired by the wingspan of a manta ray, Sam’s new four-metre tall submersible, MANTA, is currently being put to use in offshore fish-farms ...
Oct 29, 2020•26 min
The heart of the biotechnology revolution, biochemical engineering has seen the launch of entire industries. Biochemical engineers work to develop sustainable solutions to some of our greatest challenges – whether that’s creating better biofuels and biodegradable plastics, or advancing large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing during pandemics. From the discovery and manufacture of penicillin in 1918, the extraction of nature's undiscovered potential is no less important today, sitting at the int...
Oct 02, 2020•45 min
Standing a staggering 828 metres tall, comprised of more than 4,000 tonnes of structural steel, and setting nearly a dozen world records with its construction, the Burj Khalifa is immense. Not only is it a leviathan amid Dubai’s cityscape, but it currently dwarfs every other building on the planet as well. Even during the design process, the building grew from the initial proposal by almost the height of the Eiffel Tower. Just over a decade since it opened, the Burj Khalifa is today iconic. It h...
Sep 10, 2020•36 min
Just as internet pioneer Vint Cerf is known for donning a three-piece suit, so too is this week’s guest known for their accoutrement of choice: a bow tie. Whether you grew up in the US or not, chances are you’ve heard of Bill Nye. His titular show, Bill Nye the Science Guy , ran for five years in the mid-1990s, winning 19 of the 23 Emmys it was nominated for. Its combination of comedy and accessible educational content proved immensely popular, garnering an international audience while demonstra...
Aug 10, 2020•48 min
Today’s technologies would be considered magic to people just a few decades past, but the ideas behind them are often far from new. The promise of a driverless future, for example, may seem to many like it arrived in the last decade, but it’s been both “just around the corner” and symbolic of the future for the past century. The first driverless ground vehicle technically appeared in 1904, a radio-controlled tricycle developed by Leonardo Torres-Quevedo. In the 1920s, remote-controlled “phantom ...
Jul 13, 2020•33 min
Danielle George is a Professor of Microwave Communication Engineering at the University of Manchester and the incoming President of the Institution of Engineering and technology. Starting her career as a scientist, Danielle studied astrophysics at university. However, she quickly discovered the allure of engineering and, after choosing the more practical subjects during her studies, secured her very first job as a junior engineer working on the Planck satellite. Today, Danielle’s research is lar...
Jun 23, 2020•37 min
Often considered to be the world’s first skyscraper, the Home Insurance Building was completed on 1 March 1885, on the corner of Adams and LaSalle Street in Chicago. At 138 feet (42m) high, it wasn’t the tallest building in Chicago at the time – but its historical significance stems not from its height, but its engineering. Made possible by several technological breakthroughs at the time, the Home Insurance Building differed from traditional construction methods by using a structure made from ir...
May 28, 2020•30 min
Fold by fold, engineers have begun to recognise the innovative potential of origami beyond the traditional paper cranes and flowers. With its applications ranging from ingestible robots to deployable shelters, it is easy to see why the ancient art form has many excited for the future of robotics, medicine, and spaceflight. Inspired by unfurling insect wings, foldable structures have been used for their space-saving benefits in spaceflight for some time; the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JA...
May 12, 2020•27 min
If you’ve ever stared up at the night sky with curiosity and a sense of wonder, then this week’s episode of the Create the Future podcast is for you. This month, two huge engineering achievements are being celebrated. The first is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission, where engineers rescued astronauts from sudden disaster; the second is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope, which forever changed our perception of the universe in terms of both science and, th...
Apr 24, 2020•44 min
Whether you're streaming your favourite TV show, video conferencing with colleagues, posting a photo of your food on Instagram, or helping to build a to a global, community-driven supercomputer – you need the internet. Throughout history there have been several feats of engineering that have forever changed the way that we communicate, and how we see our world – inventions such as the printing press, the telegraph, and the steam engine all fundamentally altered daily human life. One of the most ...
Apr 14, 2020•47 min
If you’ve ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat, watched Avengers: Endgame, or binge-watched The Big Bang Theory, then a branch of physics called quantum mechanics may sound familiar. Quantum mechanics (or quantum theory) is one of two theories in physics that work to describe the fundamental properties of the universe, the other being Einstein’s theory of relativity. Science fiction has wrapped quantum mechanics, which focuses on the atomic level, with an intimidating veil of esoterica and counterint...
Apr 03, 2020•21 min
Bringing a touch of Hollywood glamour to Create the Future this week, we interview two visual effects (VFX) engineers whose companies have, between them, received Oscar nominations for visual effects on the Lion King, Gladiator, Life of Pi, the most recent Jungle Book, and won an Oscar for the hugely successful World War 1 movie, 1917. Unlike special effects – explosions, animatronics, and atmospheric conditions created on set – visual effects are added to a scene digitally during post-productio...
Mar 10, 2020•31 min
Earthquakes provide a complex challenge for engineers; they are difficult to predict, difficult to withstand and, subsequently, difficult to recover from. But that’s not all – as seen by the 2004 Indian Ocean and 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes, these events can also trigger unforeseen secondary disasters such as tsunamis and nuclear meltdowns, increasing the scale of the disaster several fold. According to the United States Geological Survey, in an average year an estimated several million earthquakes ...
Feb 21, 2020•26 min
Opened over a century ago, the Panama Canal is widely considered to be one of the greatest feats in engineering history , and a contender for the ‘eighth wonder of the world’. Not only did its construction produce the biggest earth dam in the world at the time, but it also, consequently, produced the largest artificial lake. The Panama Canal allows ships to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through a 48-mile-long shipping route, saving over 15,000 kilometres around the South Am...
Jan 14, 2020•21 min
Today we take our navigation for granted. Just a few moments using our phone and we’ve got our quickest route home, the scenic drive to work, and directions to the nearest coffee shop. But have you ever stopped to wonder how it actually works, or who made it? For a special sixth episode of the Create the Future podcast, we spoke to the winners of the 2019 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering after they received the award from HRH The Prince of Wales, about their work developing the Global Posit...
Dec 19, 2019•44 min
From swimsuits and coffee cups to quantum computers and medicines, materials science – the “middle of the Venn diagram between chemistry, engineering, and physics” – enables all the products, substances, and general ‘stuff’ with which we interact every day. But what makes for a good material? What makes a material ‘smart’, for that matter? And, while new, more advanced materials can help to power industries far into the future, at what cost do we make them more complex, and less degradable? Join...
Nov 11, 2019•36 min
The fourth episode of the Create the Future podcast focuses on artificial intelligence, a topic often found at the centre of modern ethical discourse, and one that frequents both the cinema screens of Hollywood, and the pages of science fiction. Joined by experts Dame Wendy Hall, professor of computer science at the University of Southampton; and Azeem Azhar, technology entrepreneur and producer of the Exponential View newsletter and podcast, we talk about the benefits of AI, as well as its ethi...
Sep 30, 2019•52 min
In this episode, we explore the origin and potential impact of smart cities . We look back on the technological and economic successes of the 2012 Olympic Games; debate the use of people’s data to improve city infrastructure; and highlight the need to ensure that smart city technology is developed to be inclusive, not a commodity. Joining us in this conversation are Dr Larissa Suzuki , senior product manager for automatic machine learning at ORACLE; and Andrew Comer , director of the cities busi...
Aug 19, 2019•36 min
In this episode, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing, we talk with Apollo engineer Dr David Baker and then traverse the surface of Mars with Airbus ExoMars rover engineer Abbie Hutty. New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts Follow @qeprize on Twitter , Instagram , and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jul 17, 2019•40 min
In this inaugural episode we talk with Lord Browne of Madingley, engineer, business leader and Chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, about the profound impact that engineering has, and continues to have, on the world around us. New episodes of ‘Create the Future: An Engineering Podcast’ every other Tuesday. www.qeprize.org/podcasts Follow @qeprize on Twitter , Instagram , and Facebook Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information....
Jul 16, 2019•21 min
