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The Flint water plant tower is seen on Jan. 6, 2022, in Flint, Mich. A judge declared a mistrial Thursday after jurors said they couldn't reach a verdict in a dispute over whether two engineering firms should bear some responsibility for Flint's lead-contaminated water. Carlos Osorio/AP hide caption

The Flint water plant tower is seen on Jan. 6, 2022, in Flint, Mich. A judge declared a mistrial Thursday after jurors said they couldn't reach a verdict in a dispute over whether two engineering firms should bear some responsibility for Flint's lead-contaminated water.

DETROIT A judge declared a mistrial Thursday after jurors said they couldn't reach a verdict in a dispute over whether two engineering firms should bear some responsibility for Flint's lead-contaminated water.

Veolia North America and Lockwood, Andrews & Newman, known as LAN, were accused of not doing enough to get Flint to treat the highly corrosive water or to urge a return to a regional water supplier.

A mistrial was declared in federal court in Ann Arbor, Michigan, court spokesman David Ashenfelter said.

After hearing months of evidence, the jury began full deliberations on July 25 but also took a planned 11-day break before returning Tuesday.

The trial centered on the engineering firms and the effects of lead on four children, not all Flint residents. But the result was being closely watched because it would likely influence possible settlements or trials in other cases.

Veolia and LAN were not part of a landmark $626 million deal involving thousands of residents of the majority-Black city, the state of Michigan and other parties.

Citing cost, Flint managers appointed by then-Gov. Rick Snyder stopped using water from a Detroit agency and switched to the Flint River while awaiting a new pipeline to Lake Huron.

The water became contaminated in 2014-15 because water pulled from the river wasn't treated to reduce the corrosive effect on lead pipes. The Michigan Civil Rights Commission said the contaminated water was the result of systemic racism in the city, doubting that the water switch and the brush-off of complaints would have occurred in a white, prosperous community.

During closing arguments, attorneys for the children argued that Veolia should be held 50% responsible for lead contamination and that LAN should be held 25% responsible, with public officials making up the balance.

But Veolia's lawyers noted the firm was briefly hired in the middle of the crisis, not before the spigot was turned on. LAN said an engineer repeatedly recommended that Flint test the river water for weeks to determine what treatments would be necessary.

LAN attorney Wayne Mason said outside engineers were getting lumped in with a "platoon of bad actors," namely state and local officials who controlled all major decisions and seemed more concerned about the cost of water than its quality.

Snyder was summoned as a witness but declined to answer questions, citing his right against self-incrimination. He was indicted on misdemeanor charges in a separate Flint water investigation, but the Michigan Supreme Court said the indictment was invalid. State prosecutors are trying to reinstate the charges.

The jury instead watched a video of Snyder's 2020 interview with lawyers.

"I wish this never would have happened," he said of the water mess, acknowledging mistakes by government.

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A mistrial is declared over engineers' role in the Flint water crisis - NPR

WATERTOWN. Mass., Aug. 11, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Xibus Systems, Inc. announces the development of XiSafe for high-speed detection of disease-causing bacteria in food and beverages.

According to the WHO, food safety is key to sustainability and economic security. Yet headlines daily detail the continual occurrences and serious impact of foodborne illness leading to a massive number of deaths and millions in lost work time worldwide annually.

Xibus' Founder, MIT Professor, Tim Swager, states "food safety testing is required by regulatory agencies worldwide. Each year $8 billion is spent on food pathogen testing. Despite that large sum spent on testing, the public routinely suffers from contaminated food with more than 400,000 fatalities annually worldwide, recalls abound, food brands suffer, and enormous quantities are thrown away. We saw the need for a powerful, easy to use test to help ensure public safety."

Xibus' President & CEO, Peter Antoinette, states "current food bacterial testing, even modern 'fast' methods, are still slow and take a day or more to get results. Food continually deteriorates after harvest. Suppliers are under tremendous pressure to ship before spoilage occurs. Untested foods go through the supply chain and reach the family table. Xibus is developing XiSafe -- an unprecedented integration of molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and AI to revolutionize the speed of pathogen testing. XiSafe test times are 8-12 hours depending on the organism and food matrix. It is a total system, designed for high throughput testing conducted by food and beverage producers, processors, and users."

"We exclusively licensed the core biomolecule technology developed by MIT Chemical Engineering Professor, Hadley Sikes. Those molecules are engineered to target and attach to a specific bacteria. Our scientists conjugate those molecules to our proprietary super-fluorescent nano-beads to create a powerful, foundational reagent for bacteria detection," mentions Xibus' CTO, Matthias Oberli.

Oberli concluded, "The XiSafe test is as powerful as PCR but fundamentally more useful for industrial based testing. It ensures high accuracy by utilizing sample sizes that are 1,000 times larger than the microliter limits imposed by PCR testing. Given we are tagging specific organisms with powerful fluorescent labels, and using AI analytics to identify the target from background bacteria and food materials, customers get the power of PCR with none of the limitations."

Xibus Systems seeks interested customers for a demonstration of XiSafe.

SOURCE Xibus Systems, Inc.

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Revolutionizing Food Safety Through the Integration of Biomolecular Engineering, Nanotechnology, and AI - PR Newswire

In 1989, a group of engineers first started working to design a space telescope that would change the way we see our universe. There was only one problem: much of the technology they would need didn't exist.

Those engineers and others went on to invent 10 brand new technologies in order to build what is now the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb), an observatory designed to do things that once seemed impossible. Engineers at contractors like Northrop Grumman, one of the private companies that worked on Webb with NASA, developed, tested and built the telescope. Here's some of the groundbreaking engineering they developed to make Webb work.

Webb is an infrared telescope, and since infrared radiation is shed as heat, the telescope's instruments had to be kept close to absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible in the universe. It was under these conditions that engineers had to test their designs for the observatory.

"If it has to operate in space at cryogenic temperatures, guess what? You got to show it meets its requirements [in] that environment," Charlie Atkinson, chief engineer at Northrop Grumman for JWST, told Space.com.

Gallery: James Webb Space Telescope's 1st photos

Engineers needed to make much of Webb's mirrors out of a material that wouldn't break in the extreme cold but was also super-light, since the telescope's mirror would be nearly 10 times bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror but also needed to be much lighter or the observatory would be too heavy to launch.

The engineers settled on beryllium a rare, super-light metal coated with an extremely thin layer of gold. But that choice meant that engineers had to come up with an entirely new way to make a very fine powder of pure beryllium metal called O-30-H so that it would be as stable as possible in cryogenic temperatures.

Then into the cold the mirrors went. Although the mirrors didn't break, they did deform slightly, Atkinson said. Here, the team faced two key challenges. First, the engineers had to make sure the mirror deformed the same way every time they got it extremely cold. Then they had to compensate for the effect by creating exactly inverse deformations at room temperature.

"They actually looked bad at room temperature so that they would be perfect at cryogenic temperature," Atkinson said.

In order to keep the telescope so cold, engineers needed to block out any trace of sunlight, a challenge they tackled by building a giant sunshield the size of a tennis court.

"I think one of the biggest challenges we had was the sunshield," Atkinson said.

The sunshield has five layers made of a film called Kapton, each coated in aluminum. The two layers closest to the sun also have a silicon coating on the side facing the sun to reflect as much light and heat back into space as possible, so the engineers were working with complex materials.

Next, the team had to make sure each layer of the shield was in exactly the right position. The layers aren't parallel to each other they're angled precisely to make sure any heat made by the spacecraft part of the observatory never makes it to the telescope and can "bounce its way out."

"If they were angled [another] way the heat would be trapped," Atkinson said.

Even the less glamorous parts of the observatory were puzzles to solve. The greatest challenge that the engineers faced might have been designing the structure that the telescope's mirrors rest on, Atkinson said.

This structure, also called the backplane, is crucial because it has to hold the 18 primary mirror segments in position relative to one another. If the support structure didn't do that well, the image quality would be ruined. For Webb, there was hardly any room for error the goal was to hold each mirror segment in place with errors no larger than tens of nanometers, which are billionths of a meter. Previous technologies had only gotten that margin down to tens of micrometers 1,000 times less than Webb's goal.

It was a big ask, to say the least.

Like the rest of the telescope, engineers had to test the backplane in cryogenic temperatures. But where engineers knew from the start how to test the mirrors, the support system was trickier. In order to reach the precision needed for Webb, engineers had to meld two technologies in a whole new way. The result, called speckle pattern interferometry, uses lasers and video technology to measure how much the rough structure deformed in the cold.

"[We] had to create a technology to validate another technology," Atkinson said. "That was probably what I thought was one of the biggest challenges."

It took decades here on Earth to engineer the materials used to make Webb, but they're now all in space, and so far, working exactly as they should. The work of engineers at Northrop Grumman and other companies that helped build Webb is finally done, and Atkinson could not be more thrilled to see what comes next.

"It's incredibly amazing that we are on the verge of handing [JWST] over to the scientists," he said at a press briefing in June. "We've got this tool that they can now use to uncover things that, you know, we don't even know how to ask the question of right now."

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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The James Webb Space Telescope makes stunning images thanks to these engineering solutions - Space.com

HUNTINGTON, WV (WOWK) The West Virginia Division of Highways has been named the Marshall University College of Engineering and Computer Science Co-Op programs 2022 Employer of the Year.

Marshall University says the agency has provided dozens of students with hands-on learning opportunities in the civil, mechanical and electrical engineering fields. The Co-Op program says the DOH was chosen based on the opportunities provided as well as student feedback.

We are exceptionally pleased to be named Marshall University Employer of the Year, said Jimmy Wriston, P.E., West Virginia Secretary of Transportation. One of the Justice administrations primary goals is to utilize partnerships to build a workforce for the futureWe appreciate this recognition very much.

Tanner Drown, co-op coordinator for the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, says the DOH has hired 20 students this summer who will move on to full-time positions after they graduate.

The West Virginia Division of Highways does an incredible job of providing co-op experiences and employment opportunities to CECS students, said Drown.

The DOH has been connected to the Co-Op program since it began in 2021. Marshall officials say students have gained real-life work experience through the partnership that they can apply to their academic training. West Virginia Department of Transportation state highway engineer, says the program is also beneficial to the DOH.

It introduces the students to the incredible opportunities DOH offers to developtheir skills and give them a real-world feel to how WVDOH operates as an organization and a team, Reed said. Co-op also opens up future employment opportunities with DOH.

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West Virginia DOH awarded Marshall Engineerings Employer of the Year - WOWK 13 News