Engineering is important, but putting your money into fine wines sounds like the ultimate win-win investment. If your cases of bordeaux or burgundy appreciate in value, you have made a profit. If their price falls, you can drown your sorrows by drinking them.

In recent years, any drinking done by investors in fine wines is likely to have been of a celebratory kind because prices have risen sharply. A case of 1990 Château Latour, which sold for £370 in 1991, would now fetch about £5,800 - a 1,400 per cent increase. Over the same period the FTSE 100 index of leading UK shares produced a return of only 370 per cent, including dividends.

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During a childhood visit to the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Margaret Anderson caught the space-travel bug. She knew then and there she wanted to work for NASA.

It wasn't just a passing fancy. Now 21, Anderson is a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, working simultaneously on her master's and bachelor's degrees in mechanical engineering. And she's living her dream. Anderson is employed at the space agency through a student co-op program and is working on hybrid rockets—experimental power plants that combine solid and liquid fuel technologies to find a cheaper, safer way into space.

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Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Gary Roughead, spoke at the 34th Annual Convention of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) in Orlando March 19.

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In an effort to better understand the most prominent issues impacting Product Design & Development readers, and to gain clarity on how you are addressing these issues, we recently conducted the 2008 Design Trends Report survey. The results, not surprisingly, reflect a growing concern for the globally expanding economy in which cost controls, engineering and speed-to-market rule the day.

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What started as an April Fool's Day prank in 1908 would eventually become a legacy to UT engineering students.

Patron saint of the Cockrell School of Engineering, Alec was the brainchild of then-engineering sophomore Joe H. Gill and his friends. They were just trying to find a way to disrupt classes, according to a compilation of engineering history by the college.

Who said that engineerong students are dull and boring ? 

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Sir James Dyson's plan for a government-backed £25m design school in Bath to inspire the next generation of inventors and engineers has been approved by the local council.

The billionaire entrepreneur and inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner is investing millions of pounds of his fortune in Britain's first specialist design and engineering school, which has been granted provisional planning permission.

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MILWAUKEE (AP) -- After being laid off from her job as an events planner at an upscale resort, Jo Ann Bauer struggled financially. She worked at several lower-paying jobs, relocated to a new city and even declared bankruptcy.

Then in December, she finally accepted her parents' invitation to move into their home - at age 52. "I'm back living in the bedroom that I grew up in," she said.

Taking shelter with parents isn't uncommon for young people in their 20s, especially when the job market is poor. But now the slumping economy and the credit crunch are forcing some children to do so later in life - even in middle age.

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Did you know Trivia - The surface of Mars appears to be covered in salt crystals which are left over  from ancient dried-up lakes - according to new research which comes from a camera on Mars Odyssey, which has been mapping the Red Planet since early 2002.
A Nasa probe has found signs that the southern hemisphere is dusted with chloride mineral, perhaps "table salt".
US scientists think the mineral formed when water evaporated from salty lakes or soil billions of years ago.
The deposits, similar to salt-pans on Earth, are a good place to search for traces of past life preserved in salt, they report in the journal Science.
The camera images Mars in the visible and infrared parts of the spectrum in order to work out the distribution of minerals on the surface.

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Hillary Clinton proposed a 9-point plan to renew the nation’s commitment to research; help create the premier science, engineering, technology and mathematics workforce; and upgrade our innovation infrastructure:

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The creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, answers questions about the future of the web, social networking and personal privacy online.

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Many years ago ago, psychologist Stanley Milgram had people stand stock still on a busy New York street and look up at the sky. About one in every 25 passersby stopped to look up, too. When five volunteers were recruited to sky-gaze, nearly one in five passersby stopped to look up.

When Milgram and his colleagues assembled a group of 18 volunteers to simultaneously look up at nothing in particular, nearly one in two passersby looked up to see what was going on, snarling traffic within moments.

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Engineers need to keep their minds sharp. Here are a few questions to give you mind a bit of a workout.  The answers, in general,  are quite obvious onece you see them.

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• Confirmation bias
  
• Hindsight bias
  
• Clustering illusion
  
• Recency effect
• Anchoring bias
• Overconfidence effect
• Fundamental Attribution error