Social media is taking over the world. 3 out of 4 Americans use sites like Facebook, YouTube, Digg and Twitter to talk to their friends, write blogs, post pictures and communicate with people within their social networks. If Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest, just behind the US, and YouTube gets almost 40 million visits a month! Social media has become a huge powerhouse of communication, and it wasn’t long before businesses started noticing. Recently, the B2B presence in social media has steeply increased—according to a study done by Business.com, over 70% of B2B companies, large and small, use at least one form of social media. [Continue Reading Article]

Growing up on a small farm in Michigan meant that there was always work to be done, especially in the summer months. Although the only crop we produced was hay, harvest time meant long days of hard work for every able bodied family member. Thankfully, the burdensome work was significantly reduced through the use of balers. These simple looking tractor accessories compress and bind the hay, making bales of a particular size and shape that are more easily transported. While the agricultural balers I grew to sincerely appreciate in my youth are still in high demand for farms of all sizes, balers of another kind are becoming increasingly popular in residential, commercial and industrial settings. These machines compact much more than crops of hay and wheat; metal, trash, plastics and cardboard are all reduced to solid blocks of material which in turn reduce waste bulk and cut carbon emissions. [Continue Reading Article]

Expanded polystyrene foam—we’ve all used it hundreds of times. When you go out to eat and can’t finish the meal, or order takeout food, chances are you carry your meal in a container made of this inexpensive but non biodegradable foam material. Commonly referred to as Styrofoam, which is actually a brand name belonging to Dow Chemical, EPS is used worldwide by restaurants of every price range. In the last couple years, a debate has begun about whether or not to ban EPS from use as disposable food and beverage containers altogether. Over 100 cities, including San Francisco (which got the ball rolling) have instated a city-wide ban on all polystyrene foam. This trend is great news on the environmental front, but bad for struggling businesses. So, which side are you on? Let’s take a closer look at each argument. [Continue Reading Article]

Some of the most precious and valuable elements on Earth are buried deep beneath the surface, just waiting to be found. While diamonds, gold and silver are the first that come to mind, lesser known, exotic elements like neodymium, a rare earth magnet, may be the most invaluable of all. It isn’t shiny or beautiful, but this silvery-grey magnet is expensive and highly sought after. Miners crawl deep into open pit mines, thousands of feet below the surface and appear with truckloads of the unimpressive looking chunks of metal. The raw element is shipped in large steel barrels to a manufacturing facility, where it is finely ground into powder and pressed into high temperature molds. Neodymium exhibits some extraordinary and unusual properties. When compounded with iron and boron, this magnet creates a magnetic field up to 25 times more powerful than those made from standard ferrites. It has exceptional resistance to demagnetization, and very small volumes provide the best performance of any magnet out there. [Continue Reading Article]

With the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics well underway, newsrooms around the globe follow a rising medals count. The elite athletes participating in the games and their eager nations watching from afar hope for the fulfillment of the ultimate Olympic dream, standing atop the podium as a gold, silver or bronze medal is draped around their neck. For many of the more than 5,500 Olympians representing more than 80 nations, receiving a medal will remain a dream, an ambition for future feats of athleticism perhaps. For a select 615 individuals, however, that dream will become a realization. 615 is the exact number of medallions created at The Royal Canadian Mint for the XXI Olympic Winter Games. Each of these was produced through unique metal stamping processes creating one of a kind medals for each athlete’s one of a kind moment. [Continue Reading Article]

Ever heard of Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation? It may sound unfamiliar, but it’s the technical name for a laser, one of the most important inventions of the last century. They have been around for about 50 years and make our lives easier in so many ways. Lasers remove scars, correct vision, scan bar codes and provide hours of endless entertainment for my kitten. Without them, CD players, printers and check-out line scanners would not exist. In the medical and manufacturing industries, lasers are slowly taking the place of cutting materials with scalpels, saws, blades and stamps because they are more reliable, offer higher accuracy and continuous operation. Lasers are able to penetrate through any material, from the hardest metals to human skin and a single layer of tissue in your eye. [Continue Reading Article]

Electron Energy Corporation (EEC), the nation’s leading producer of rare-earth magnets for critical applications, was recently awarded a $100,000 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contract by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, Dayton, OH, for the development of a magnetic refrigerator. EEC is collaborating on the project with Astronautics Corporation of America, Milwaukee, WI, a global leader in developing cutting-edge magnetocaloric refrigeration systems. The announcement was made by EEC President Michael H. Walmer. [Continue Reading Article]

Air conditioners are probably the most necessary of all luxury and comfort items, especially if you inhabit a warm climate. I live in Michigan, which yes, in the winter months is unbelievably cold, but in July and August, 90 degrees and humid isn’t that uncommon. I’ve also never lived in a house with central air conditioning; so I know—a hot, sunny, humid day without AC is almost torture…until you get your energy bill, that is. Standard air conditioning systems have been the established method of cooling residential and commercial buildings since they first appeared in the 60 because are so effective. Put on full blast, walking into your house is like walking into the Arctic Circle. However, they suck up energy and are probably the most un-green system in your house. During peak summer months, AC is responsible for about 100 million tons of carbon emission each year. [Continue Reading Article]

Hartzell Fan, Inc., Piqua, Ohio, has just completed the acquisition of seven product lines from ACME Engineering and Manufacturing Company, Muskogee, Oklahoma. The seven product lines consist of a variety of types and sizes of centrifugal fans and nicely complement Hartzell’s existing centrifugal product lines. The new products provide a combination of new product lines or an expansion via larger sizes or higher flow and pressures of Hartzell’s current product lines. The product lines acquired consist of turbo pressure blowers, industrial exhausters, inline centrifugals, radial tip blowers, and airfoil centrifugals. [Continue Reading Article]

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that shook the island nation of Haiti on January 12, 2010 left in its wake a city in ruins. The capital city, Port-au-Prince, was reduced to rubble and residents found themselves searching desperately through the wreckage in hopes of rescuing loved ones. Equipment was needed to cut, spread, lift, pull and separate the tangle of concrete and rebar trapping victims. This machinery was powered by hydraulic pumps. The pumps work by creating pressure enough to move a liquid, often oil or water, through cylinders and hoses thereby creating mechanical energy. This energy is used to run generators, power excavators and hydraulic water pumps even provide water to the Haitian people. [Continue Reading Article]

Mokon’s Full Range process temperature control system offers a combination heating/chilling system in one convenient package. These units are ideal for applications including jacketed vessels, reactors, multiple-zone processes, laboratory, sanitary, food processing, chemical processing, and other processes that require both heating and chilling. [Continue Reading Article]

When I think of a screw, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is a threaded fastener that holds two objects together. Those simple little things sure do come in handy. In fact, I used a couple yesterday to re-attach my closet organizer to the wall after it had collapsed under the weight of all my clothes. Standard screws are composed of a threaded shaft (the main component, with the spiral grooves running horizontally) and a nut, the small piece with internal threading that runs up and down the shaft. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, not in all cases. They aren’t well known, but there are power screws out there that do much more than hold objects securely together. One of those types is a ball screw. While they are essentially composed of the same parts, these screws are more complicated and vital components in many technically advanced applications. [Continue Reading Article]

In 1821, Thomas Johann Seebeck discovered thermo-electricity and developed the preliminary design for thermocouples. At this time, the idea of electricity in every home was a stretch and the NASA space program was a complete work of fiction. Nearly two hundred years later, thermocouples can be found in virtually every industrial, commercial and residetherntial building. Simple in design, thermocouples are constructed of two distinct metal wires joined together. If the temperatures changes, the voltage readout also changes and alerts users to the difference. In some ways these devices are like common thermostats, but for electronics rather than room temperature. They have become such an integral element of temperature sensory that researchers at the NASA Glenn Research Center continue to expand upon Seebeck’s original idea for both space and earthbound applications. Research conducted there and independently by manufacturers allows for innovative thermocouple technology that can be applied in the home, in the workplace and in outer space. [Continue Reading Article]

In the mid 1600s, a German mayor of a small town performed a trick using 2 metal half-spheres and a team of sixteen horses to entertain some houseguests. It was the first time he put his invention—a piston and air gun cylinder with two-way flaps designed to pull air out of whatever vessel it was connected to—to use in front of other people. The mayor, named Otto von Guericke, joined the two copper hemispheres together and pumped the air out using his contraption. He then harnessed eight horses to each half. The result? An astonished audience, completely inseparable copper hemispheres and the very first demonstration of a vacuum pump. It didn’t take long for this trick to gain popularity, and Guericke began performing in the German court with more and more horses. The power of a vacuum quickly caught the eye of scientists, who began using vacuum pumps to study properties of gasses and electricity. Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a single industrial factory or experimentation facility that doesn’t use a vacuum pump. [Continue Reading Article]

Think back to the last time you made Christmas cookies with your grandmother. You know, those sugar cookies shaped like candy canes, Christmas trees and snowflakes that are topped in icing and colored sugar. They are a big part of my family’s holiday traditions, and I looked forward to making them every year. Creating those complex shapes was no big deal, even for a little girl. They came out perfect every time, thanks to cookie cutters, those metal cut-out shapes that ensured a high degree of accuracy. Without them, the candy canes would be indistinguishable from the trees. Now, take the idea of a cookie cutter, make it automated and take it from your grandmother’s kitchen and into a manufacturing environment...what do you have? Die cutting—the industrial process that takes 2 dimensional sheets of material and forms them into complex shapes using a metal saw, diamond tipped saw or, more recently, laser beams. [Continue Reading Article]