Canadian Engineering Marvels

CN Tower voted world wonder!
According to the Nov. 15, 1995 Toronto Sun, the CN Tower, a towering symbol of engineering excellence, has been chosen by the U.S. magazine Popular Mechanics as one of the Seven Wonders of the Modern World. The other six are the Itaipu Dam on the Brazil-Paraguay border, the Panama Canal, the Golden Gate Bridge, the English Channel Tunnel, the Netherlands North Sea Protection Works and New York's Empire State Building. The American Society of Civil Engineers canvassed engineering societies around the globe and a panel of experts chose the final seven engineering marvels.

How About These World-Renowned Engineering Feats?

THE LATEST IN ENGINEERING MATERIALS

While PEO members have worked with metals, woods, rock, concrete, plastic, and probably every other substance you can mention, one professional engineer can claim to work with a unique structural material: bone!

According to the September 16, 1996 issue of the University of Toronto Bulletin, Professor Robert Pilliar, P.Eng., of the Centre for Biomaterials, and Marc Grynpas, of the Connective Tissue Research Group at Mount Sinai Hospital's Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute are developing a synthetic bone substitute, which they believe will help people who have shattered bones, or have lost tissue due to disease.

The substance, which has had promising results in animal trials, is about three years away from human clinical testing. Pilliar and Grynpas hope to use the synthetic bone as a substitute for painful bone grafts, the preferred method for bridging large fracture gaps and stimulating bone growth and healing.

And, according to the June 19, 1998 issue of the Globe and Mail, soon we'll be able to grow our own replacement hearts. "A heart in a box, a heart grown in a lab for the sole purpose of transplantation, is not completely far-fetched," says University of Toronto engineering professor Michael Sefton, P.Eng.. Multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, biologists, geneticists and a host of other specialists are working to find ways of replacing injured or diseased body parts with living, flesh-and-blood substitutes.

The new discipline, tissue engineering, is only a few years away from marketing a polymer bead which promotes the growth of blood vessels and could speed the healing of wounds and lessen the damage caused by heart attacks.

 

DID YOU KNOW?

In 1996, according to Michael Kesterton of the Globe and Mail, British engineer Mark Whitby and a crew of 120 labourers reconstructed the central part of Stonehenge in just five days. Using only greasy planks, and other tools available 4,000 years ago, Whitby and his team built a replica of the 90-tonne Great Trilithon. Current archeological theory holds that a workforce of up to 1,000 labourers using stone rollers were needed to get the stones in place.