Posts by: Grace Ingalls

Hummingbird’s Wake

One of my favorite things about spring and summer is lying in an open field watching the clouds go by. Every once and a while a plane will go by leaving an enormous wake of what looks like white clouds behind it. Only recently did I learn that these cloud trails are caused by vortexes of […]

It’s a bird. No it’s an insect. No, wait, its a hummingbird!

When we are young, we classify everything into very black and white catagories. What is a bird? Orginally, our response was a tiny flying animal with feathers and wings. However, that description is astronomically incorrect. Birds do not have to be small. The largest flying bird, the Argentavis, (extinct as of 2009) has a wingspan […]

Shinkansen “bullet trains”: Biomimicry at it’s best.

Being an engineer is difficult. Not only do you have an extremely demanding workload and challenging classes, but you also get the prejudice of being, well, a nerd. “Oh, you’re an engineer? Never mind, you probably haven’t even been camping.” or “I guessed you probably don’t like animals because, you know, you’re  an engineer.” are the […]