Is there a certain item that you cannot go through the day without? Your morning cup of joe? Wireless internet? Your car? Over the years, many of us have developed rituals that, if gone missing, would greatly affect our performance throughout the rest of the day (and, as others have found, sometimes for the entire week). This issue of <i>Illumin</i> celebrates the contributions engineers make that allow us to enjoy our day-to-day comforts and necessities.

Two-thirds of Americans start off their mornings with a cup of coffee. To avoid an excess caffeine intake, many choose to go decaf – but have decaf fans ever wondered how their coffee gets decaffeinated? Decaffeination methods are true feats of chemical engineering, involving intricate refinement steps and biochemical processes. While current methods are necessary to remove caffeine from naturally caffeinated beans, scientists have also recently discovered a new coffee bean species that comes decaffeinated from the get-go.

While enjoying our morning drinks, we flip open our laptops, phones, and other Wi-Fi gadgets for everything from checking email to checking the amount of traffic to work. Among other things, our national power grid is responsible for providing us with the electricity to access the world at our fingertips. However, with each year’s rapid growth in population size, it is estimated that U.S. energy demand will grow by 30% in the next ten years, resulting in unprecedented stress that our current grid will be unable to sustain. The development of Smart Grid technology has the potential to revolutionize our electrical infrastructure and ensure our energy use is efficient, reliable, and sustainable for years to come.

After breakfast comes the much-dreaded commute to the workplace or school. For many of us, this can quickly become the least favorite part of the day, as rush hour traffic causes delays that leave the average American spending about 87 minutes in the car every day. Engineers are looking into air travel as a solution to relieve congestion on the ground, with aerospace engineers inventing flying cars that can function both as a car and as a flying vehicle. Meanwhile, civil engineers are re-evaluating how existing transportation infrastructure would need to change to adapt to these new hybrid vehicles and allow for safe and efficient travel. These aircrafts may transform the landscape of civil transportation and offer the possibility of personalized flight travel in the future.

While the American lifestyle may differ from day-to-day habits elsewhere, we join along with sports fans from around the world to watch the much-anticipated FIFA World Cup. Held once every four years, the World Cup is the world's most widely viewed sporting event, with an estimated 26 billion viewers tuning in to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Adidas engineers designed a brand new soccer ball, Jabulani, to debut as the official World Cup ball in 2010. Jabulani featured a seamless multi-panel design aimed at providing players with a perfectly smooth and aerodynamically consistent ball. However, the ball drew heavy criticism from players and coaches who protested that the ball greatly affected the outcome of several key games.

Perhaps a less controversial but equally ubiquitous creation is one that dessert fans around the world enjoy: cake. Special occasions call for a grand dessert, often involving multi-tiered-cakes that must be delicious but also sturdy enough to stand on their own. Surprisingly, cakes share many structural elements with buildings, and bakers often add hidden supports to keep the cake upright similar to the way civil engineers and architects design the structural support of buildings.

Whether enjoying our morning coffee, access to electricity, method of commute, or perhaps the less frequent World Cup and occasional slice of cake, we often take for granted the items that bring us joy and convenience. Engineers have made great efforts to sustain and improve our standards of living, and are continually adapting to new problems and circumstances to provide the most efficient solutions and technologies. We hope you enjoy this issue of Illumin and are able to leave with a greater understanding of the engineering behind these everyday items, as well as a broader appreciation for the ingenuity that goes into creating them.