Science and Engineering: Innovation, Research, Education and Economics
July 2, 2009

Robert Brooks on Robots

Rodney Brooks on advancing the use of robots in the world (speech from the Makir Fair).

Related: posts on robotics - Surgeon-engineer advances high-tech healing - Cardiac Cath Lab: Innovation on Site - Toyota Software Development for Partner Robots

Ant mega-colony

Ant mega-colony takes over world

Argentine ants living in vast numbers across Europe, the US and Japan belong to the same interrelated colony, and will refuse to fight one another. The colony may be the largest of its type ever known for any insect species, and could rival humans in the scale of its world domination.

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the ‘Californian large’, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct. But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony.

The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.

Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony.

But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.

Related: posts on ants - E.O. Wilson: Lord of the Ants - Huge Ant Nest

July 1, 2009

Toyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair

Toyota has developed a thought-controlled wheelchair (along with Japanese government research institute, RIKEN, and Genesis Research Institute). Honda has also developed a system that allows a person to control a robot through thoughts. Both companies continue to invest in innovation and science and engineering. The story of a bad economy and bad sales for a year or two is what you read in most newspapers. The story of why Toyota and Honda will be dominant companies 20 years from now is their superior management and focus on long term success instead of short term quarterly results.

The BSI-Toyota Collaboration Center, has succeeded in developing a system which utilizes one of the fastest technologies in the world, controlling a wheelchair using brain waves in as little as 125 milliseconds (one millisecond, or ms, is equal to 1/1000 seconds.

Plans are underway to utilize this technology in a wide range of applications centered on medicine and nursing care management. R&D under consideration includes increasing the number of commands given and developing more efficient dry electrodes. So far the research has centered on brain waves related to imaginary hand and foot control. However, through further measurement and analysis it is anticipated that this system may be applied to other types of brain waves generated by various mental states and emotions.

Related: Honda’s Robolegs Help People Walk - Real-time control of wheelchairs with brain waves - Toyota Winglet, Personal Transportation - Toyota Robots - More on Non-Auto Toyota - Honda has Never had Layoffs and has been Profitable Every Year

June 30, 2009

Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce Monday that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics.

“We give them the oxygen, we get very pure carbon dioxide, and the output is very cheap ethanol,” said Mr. Woods, who said the target price was $1 a gallon.

Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.

The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.

Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant.

Initial proof of science was generated by Dr. John Coleman at the University of Toronto between 1989 and 1999. Since then, the process has been refined to allow algae to tolerate high heat, high salinity, and the alcohol levels present in ethanol production. This is another example of the benefit of university research and investing in science and engineering innovation.

Related: Ethanol: Science Based Solution or Special Interest Welfare - Converting Emissions to Biofuels - Student Algae Bio-fuel Project - Kudzu Biofuel Potential - Global Installed Wind Power Now Over 1.5% of Global Electricity Demand

June 29, 2009

Productivity Gains in Software Engineering

Great post: Productivity gains in software engineering are powering innovation

According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, today’s business industry workers are on average 30% more productive than their 1998 counterparts (productivity growth of roughly 2.6% per year).

The most dramatic gains, however, have occurred within software development.

Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999!

In my 15 years of software development, I’ve seen 5x-10x productivity gains in engineers. Which could mean that the productivity of a well-trained engineer doubles every five years. (note that this Law is much harder to prove than Moore’s Law – but potentially just as profound). That would mean that the productivity of an engineer is growing at roughly 14.9% per year! That’s fast … really fast … much faster than the 2.6% yearly gains the population as a whole is making.

What do you think? I definitely see a huge improvement of productivity in web application software development myself.

Related: 10x Productivity Difference in Software Development - Is Productivity Growth Bad - The Software Developer Labor Market - Myths of Manufacturing Productivity

June 28, 2009

Barbara Liskov wins Turing Award

photo of Barbara Liskovphoto of Barbara Liskov by Donna Coveney

Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing Machinery’s A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer programming languages.

Liskov, the first U.S. woman to earn a PhD from a computer science department, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing.”

“Computer science stands squarely at the center of MIT’s identity, and Institute Professor Barbara Liskov’s unparalleled contributions to the field represent an MIT ideal: groundbreaking research with profound benefits for humankind. We take enormous pride that she has received the Turing Award,” said MIT President Susan Hockfield.

“Barbara Liskov pioneered some of the most important advances in fundamental computer science,” said Provost L. Rafael Reif. “Her exceptional achievements have leapt from the halls of academia to transform daily life around the world. Every time you exchange e-mail with a friend, check your bank statement online or run a Google search, you are riding the momentum of her research.”

The Turing Award is given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery and is named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, who helped the Allies crack the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II.

Read the full article at MIT.

Related: 2006 Draper Prize for Engineering - Thompson and Tits share 2008 Abel Prize (Math) - von Neumann Architecture and Bottleneck - MIT related posts

June 25, 2009

General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test

batteries for the cesium clocksphoto of the batteries for the cesium clocks in the family van by Tom Van Baak

Project GREAT: General Relativity Einstein/Essen Anniversary Test is not your average home experiment but it is another great example of experiments people run at home.

In September 2005 (for the 50th anniversary of the atomic clock and 100th anniversary of the theory of relativity) we took several cesium clocks on a road trip to Mt Rainier; a family science experiment unlike anything you’ve seen before.

By keeping the clocks at altitude for a weekend we were able to detect and measure the effects of relativistic time dilation compared to atomic clocks we left at home. The amazing thing is that the experiment worked! The predicted and measured effect was just over 20 nanoseconds.

But the time dilation was somewhere in the 20 to 30 ns range. The number we expected was 23 ns so I’m very pleased with the result.

Related: Home Experiments: Quantum Erasing - Science Toys You Can Make With Your Kids - Home Experiment: Deriving the Gravitational Constant - Statistics for Experimenters

June 23, 2009

The Evolution of House Cats

Fritz the Cat Photo shows Fritz the Cat - see photos Fritz took.

Scientific American has a long and interesting article on: The Evolution of House Cats

It is by turns aloof and affectionate, serene and savage, endearing and exasperating. Despite its mercurial nature, however, the house cat is the most popular pet in the world. A third of American households have feline members, and more than 600 million cats live among humans worldwide.

Together the transport of cats to the island and the burial of the human with a cat indicate that people had a special, intentional relationship with cats nearly 10,000 years ago in the Middle East. This locale is consistent with the geographic origin we arrived at through our genetic analyses. It appears, then, that cats were being tamed just as humankind was establishing the first settlements in the part of the Middle East known as the Fertile Crescent.

Over time, wildcats more tolerant of living in human-dominated environments began to proliferate in villages throughout the Fertile Crescent. Selection in this new niche would have been principally for tameness, but competition among cats would also have continued to influence their evolution and limit how pliant they became. Because these proto–domestic cats were undoubtedly mostly left to fend for themselves, their hunting and scavenging skills remained sharp. Even today most domesticated cats are free agents that can easily survive independently of humans, as evinced by the plethora of feral cats in cities, towns and countrysides the world over.

So are today’s cats truly domesticated? Well, yes—but perhaps only just. Although they satisfy the criterion of tolerating people, most domestic cats are feral and do not rely on people to feed them or to find them mates. And whereas other domesticates, like dogs, look quite distinct from their wild ancestors, the average domestic cat largely retains the wild body plan. It does exhibit a few morphological differences, however—namely, slightly shorter legs, a smaller brain and, as Charles Darwin noted, a longer intestine, which may have been an adaptation to scavenging kitchen scraps.

Cats are Cool :-)

Related: Origins of the Domestic Cat - The Engineer That Made Your Cat a Photographer - DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution - Genetic Research Suggests Cats ‘Domesticated Themselves’

June 21, 2009

Sustainable Aquaculture

Sustainable Aquaculture

Located on an island in the Guadalquivir river, 10 miles (16km) inland from the Atlantic, Veta la Palma produces 1,200 tons of sea bass, bream, red mullet and shrimp each year. Yet unlike most of the world’s fish farms, it does so not by interfering with nature, but by improving upon it. “Veta la Palma raises fish sustainably and promotes the conservation of birdlife at the same time,” says Daniel Lee, best practices director for the U.S.-based Global Aquaculture Alliance. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

With wild fish stocks declining precipitously around the globe, thanks to overfishing and climate change, aquaculture has emerged as perhaps the only viable way to satisfy the world’s appetite for fish fingers and maki rolls. In the next few years, consumption of farm-raised fish will surpass that caught in the wild for the first time, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. But most fish farms — even ones heralded as “sustainable” — create as many problems as they solve, from fecal contamination to the threat that escaped cultivated fish pose to the gene pool of their wild cousins.

Veta la Palama is different. In 1982, the family that owns the Spanish food conglomerate Hisaparroz bought wetlands that had been drained for cattle-farming and reflooded them. “They used the same channels built originally to empty water into the Atlantic,” explains Medialdea. “Just reversed the flow.” Today, that neat little feat of engineering allows the tides to sweep in estuary water, which a pumping station distributes throughout the farm’s 45 ponds. Because it comes directly from the ocean, that water teems with microalgae and tiny translucent shrimp, which provide natural food for the fish that Veta la Palma raises.

By hewing as closely as possible to nature, the farm avoids many of the problems that that plague other aquaculture projects. Low density — roughly 9 lb. (4 kg) of fish to every 35 cu. ft. (1 cu m) of water — helps keep the fish free of parasites (the farm loses only 0.5% of its annual yield to them). And the abundant plant life circling each pond acts as a filter, cleansing the water of nitrogen and phosphates.

Related: Rethinking the Food Production System - Fishless Future - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. - Running Out of Fish

June 19, 2009

Saving the World with Science and Mushrooms

Entrepreneurial mycologist Paul Stamets studies mushrooms. The focus of Stamets’ research is the Northwest’s native fungal genome, mycelium, but along the way he has filed 22 patents for mushroom-related technologies, including pesticidal fungi that trick insects into eating them, and mushrooms that can break down the neurotoxins used in nerve gas.

The webcast really gets interesting at minute 9 or so (in my opinion) with 6 specific examples.

Related: Fun Fungi - Thinking Slime Moulds - Microbe Types

June 17, 2009

HHMI Expands Support of Postdoctoral Scientists

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute provides a huge amount of science and health care related funding. HHMI is expanding existing relationships to fund postdoc scientist fellows at with Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund, the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, and the Life Sciences Research Foundation. The funding should support 32 additional postdoc scientists. HHMI Expands Support of Postdoctoral Scientists

Fellows will be selected competitively by each organization. Each fellowship will have a three-year term. When the initiative is at full capacity, HHMI will be supporting 96 postdoctoral fellows at an anticipated annual cost of about $5 million. The program began in 2007 when HHMI announced it would fund up to 16 postdoctoral fellows in HHMI labs each year. There is no requirement that future fellows be appointed in HHMI labs.

Related: Genomics Course For College Freshman Supported by HHMI at 12 Universities - $60 Million in Grants for Universities - Howard Hughes Medical Institute Takes Big Open Access Step - posts on science and engineering funding

June 15, 2009

Albert Einstein, Marylin Monroe Hybrid Image

Albert Einstein, Marylin Monroe Hybrid ImageThis image looks like Albert Einstein up close. If you back up maybe 3-5 meters it will look like Marylin Monroe. Image by Dr. Aude Oliva.

Hybrid images paper by Aude Oliva, MIT; Antonio Torralba, MIT; and Philippe G. Schyns University of Glasgow.

We present hybrid images, a technique that produces static images with two interpretations, which change as a function of viewing distance. Hybrid images are based on the multiscale processing of images by the human visual system and are motivated by masking studies in visual perception. These images can be used to create
compelling displays in which the image appears to change as the viewing distance changes. We show that by taking into account perceptual grouping mechanisms it is possible to build compelling hybrid images with stable percepts at each distance.

Hybrid images, however, contain two coherent global image interpretations, one of which is of the low spatial frequencies, the other of high spatial frequencies.

For a given distance of viewing, or a given temporal frequency a particular band of spatial frequency dominates visual processing. Visual analysis of the hybrid image still unfolds from global to local perception, but within the selected frequency band, for a given viewing distance, the observer will perceive the global structure of the hybrid first, and take an additional hundred milliseconds to organize the local information into a coherent percept (organization of blobs if the image is viewed at a far distance, or organization of edges for close viewing).

Very cool stuff.

   
Albert Einstein, Marylin Monroe Hybrid ImageThis is just a smaller image of the above (all I did was shrink the size). For me, this already looks like Marilyn Monroe, but also needs a shorter distance to see the image seem to change.




Related: Illusions, Optical and Other - How Our Brain Resolves Sight - Seeing Patterns Where None Exists - Magenta is a Color - posts on scientific explanations of what we experience - Computational Visual Cognition Laboratory at MIT


June 12, 2009

Friday Fun: Dolphins Play with Air Bubble Rings

Bubbles in water

The bubble is the most stable situation for an amount of gas phase in water (liquid phase). A surface tension is associated with the surface between the gas phase and the liquid phase, the surface tension tends to minimize the surface area. This is also described in the section on bubbles in bubble models. Given a volume of gas, the sphere (bubble) shape is the shape that has the smallest surface area with respect to the containing volume.

The situation of a bubble in water is comparable to a balloon. The balloon surface is elastic. The tension of it tries to minimize the surface: if you don’t tie a knot in the balloon after blowing it up, air escapes and the surface of the balloon is minimized to the initial unstretched situation.

Bubbles do not turn into rings naturally. Something has to be done for that. However, they have long lives and often make it up to the surface. Hence they are stable structures.

Dolphins create bubble rings by blowing air in a water vortex ring: by flipping a fin they create a vortex ring of water. The then blow air in the ring, which goes to the center of the vortex ring. In the water vortex ring the natural location of the air is in the center of the vortex. When air and water move in a circular path like they do in the vortex ring, air and water are separated due to the centripetal force. Since density of water is larger than air, water moves at the outside, while the air ends up in the middle.

Follow the link for much more on the physics of bubble rings.

Related: Colored Bubbles - Dolphins Using Tools to Hunt - Do Dolphins Sleep? - posts on animals

June 11, 2009

Teen diagnoses her own disease in science class

Teen diagnoses her own disease in science class

Her doctors, no matter how hard they tried, couldn’t figure out the cause of Jessica’s abdominal distress. Then one day in January, Terry, 18, figured it out on her own.

In her Advanced Placement high school science class, she was looking under the microscope at slides of her own intestinal tissue — slides her pathologist had said were completely normal — and spotted an area of inflamed tissue called a granuloma, a clear indication that she had Crohn’s disease.

“It’s weird I had to solve my own medical problem,” Terry told CNN affiliate KOMO in Seattle, Washington. “There were just no answers anywhere. … I was always sick.”

Crohn’s disease is often misdiagnosed or diagnosed very late, says Dr. Corey Siegel, director of the Inflammatory Bowel Disease Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire. “Granulomas are oftentimes very hard to find and not always even present at all,” Siegel said. “I commend Jessica for her meticulous work.”

Related: High School Student Isolates Microbe that Eats Plastic - Siemens Westinghouse Competition Winners - High School Inventor Teams @ MIT

June 9, 2009

How To Become A Software Engineer/Programmer

How To Become A Software Engineer/Programmer

my advice for budding software engineers is this.

1) Know that you love software before you commit to it. You’ll know when you take your first pseudocode class: a clear division forms between the people who get it and the people who don’t. If you’re in the “don’t” section, choose another career.

2) If you don’t like teaching yourself new things, the skills you learn today will be irrelevant in less than a decade. Accept the commitment to learn throughout your career as a coder, or accept your eventual fate as a has-been.

3) College degrees matter less than hands-on knowledge and time spent at the keyboard. I outpaced my entire class in college because I bought my own programming books that deviated from the coursework, and as a result I learned things they were not teaching in school.

5) Early on, decide if you want to focus on application development or software engineering. Application development deals with making user interfaces, interfacing different systems together, solving business process problems, and exposing applications to the outside world (i.e. web services and other remoting techniques). Software engineering deals with creation of utilities and processes that support information processing, tends to be more math intensive, requires a lower-level understanding of the trade, and rarely deals with the systems that expose the software to an end user. There are core differences in these two disciplines and 100 shades in between, so figure out what you like.

Good blog post; those thinking of a career in software development should read the whole thing. By the way if you are a programmer already that loves it and looking for a new position: my work is hiring a Ruby on Rails developer.

Related: Joy in Work, Software Development - The Software Developer Labor Market - A Career in Computer Programming - The Manager FAQ - IT Talent Shortage, or Management Failure?

June 8, 2009

Rutgers Initiative to Help Disadvantaged Children

Praise for ambitious Rutgers initiative to help disadvantaged youths

It’s been a year since Rutgers University launched one of the country’s most ambitious education experiments, a campaign to change the fortunes of urban teenagers

Adolescents, their parents and public school administrators uniformly praise the Future Scholars Program. Last June, the initiative started 200 disadvantaged seventh-graders along a five-year path of summer workshops, tutoring, social support and cultural outings. Their reward if they keep a B average and meet other requirements: a full ride to Rutgers.

The Rutgers Future Scholars Program is not targeting science, it focuses on all academic areas.

The goal of the Rutgers Future Scholars program is to increase the numbers of academically ambitious high school graduates who come from low-income backgrounds, help them meet the standards to be admitted to colleges and universities, and then provide tuition funding to those who are admitted and choose to attend Rutgers University.

By improving educational opportunities, in general, more disadvantaged children will have the opportunity to become scientists and engineers. They are highlighting what recent high school graduates from the Camden school are doing, such as Aspiring Physician, Stem Cell Researcher, Rutgers-Camden Student

Most students don’t conduct stem-cell research and sit on a national board with a $3 million budget. Tej Nuthulaganti isn’t like most students.

After earning his undergraduate degree in biology from Rutgers-Camden in 2007, Tej is on track to earn his graduate degree in biology this May, thanks to the five-year combined bachelor and master degree program in biology at Rutgers-Camden.

For the past two years the 2003 graduate of Highland High School has been working with Daniel Shain, an associate professor of biology at Rutgers-Camden and one of the nation’s leading experts on leech research. Nuthulaganti has furthered Shain’s research on identifying key genes that are pivotal in the stem cell formation in the leech, which gives a simple model system for more complicated research. Their research could be beneficial in the early detection of cancerous cells.

In addition to presenting his research at major conferences, including one at the University of California-Berkeley, Nuthulaganti has also made sure that his fellow students who are considering careers in medicine also have a forum to ask questions and think deeply about what kinds of doctors they’d like to be.

There are many great programs underway that are aimed at improving education performance. And this seems like another good effort.

Related: Fund Teacher’s Science Projects - Middle School Engineers - Engineer Your Life - Project Lead The Way - Beloit College: Girls and Women in Science - Germany Looking to Kindergarten for Engineering Future

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