Science and Engineering: Innovation, Research, Education and Economics
August 30, 2010

The Mystery of Empty Space

Get ready to re-think your ideas of reality. Join UCSD physicist Kim Griest as he takes you on a fascinating excursion, addressing some of the massive efforts and tantalizing bits of evidence which suggest that what goes on in empty space determines the properties of the three-dimensional existence we know and love, and discusses how that reality may be but the wiggling of strings from other dimensions.

Related: HiggsLooking for Signs of Dark Matter Over AntarcticaFeynman “is a second Dirac, only this time human”

August 27, 2010

Nearly 1 million Children Potentially Misdiagnosed with ADHD in the USA

Nearly 1 million children in the United States are potentially misdiagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder simply because they are the youngest – and most immature – in their kindergarten class, according to new research by , Todd Elder, a Michigan State University economist.

These children are significantly more likely than their older classmates to be prescribed behavior-modifying stimulants such as Ritalin, said Todd Elder, whose study will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Health Economics (closed science, unfortunately). Michigan State should stop funding closed journals with free content – other schools have decided to put science first, before supporting a few outdated business models of select journals.

Such inappropriate treatment is particularly worrisome because of the unknown impacts of long-term stimulant use on children’s health, Elder said. It also wastes an estimated $320 million-$500 million a year on unnecessary medication – some $80 million-$90 million of it paid by Medicaid, he said.

ADHD is the most commonly diagnosed behavioral disorder for kids in the United States, with at least 4.5 million diagnoses among children under age 18, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The youngest kindergartners were 60 percent more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than the oldest children in the same grade. Similarly, when that group of classmates reached the fifth and eighth grades, the youngest were more than twice as likely to be prescribed stimulants.

Overall, the study found that about 20 percent – or 900,000 – of the 4.5 million children currently identified as having ADHD likely have been misdiagnosed.

Related: Lifestyle Drugs and RiskLong Term ADHD Drug Benefits QuestionedMerck and Elsevier Publish Phony Peer-Review Journal

August 24, 2010

Volleyball Sized Hail

photo of volleyball sized hail

On July 23, 2010, a severe thunderstorm struck Vivian, South Dakota, USA, a quiet rural community of less than 200. While there was nothing unusual about a violent summer storm, the softball (and larger)-sized hail that accompanied it was extraordinary. In fact, it led to the discovery of the largest hailstone ever recorded in the United States.

Once the thunderstorm passed, Vivian resident Les Scott ventured outside to see if there was any damage as a result of the storm. He was surprised to see a tremendous number of large hailstones on the ground, including one about the size of a volleyball. Scott gathered up that stone, along with a few smaller ones, and placed them in his freezer.

How does hail form?

  • Inside of a thunderstorm are strong updrafts of warm air and downdrafts of cold air.
  • If a water droplet is picked up by the updrafts…it can be carried well into colder zones and the water droplet freezes.
  • As the frozen droplet begins to fall, carried by cold downdrafts, it may partially thaw as it moves into warmer air toward the bottom of the thunderstorm
  • But, if the little half-frozen droplet get picked up again by another updraft and is carried back into very cold air it will re-freeze. With each trip above and below the freezing level our frozen droplet adds another layer of ice.
  • Finally, the frozen hail, with many layers of ice, much like the rings in a tree falls to the ground.

According to NOAA, the Kansas City hail storm on April 10, 2001 was the costliest hail storm in the U.S. which caused damages of an estimated $2 billion.

Image from NOAA

Related: 500 Year FloodsClouds Alive With BacteriaRare “Rainbow” Over IdahoWhy is it Colder at Higher Elevations?

August 20, 2010

Ants, Ants, Ants

Ants really are amazing. The internet makes it easy to learn about these creatures. My Dad found them fascinating and I picked up that view. I had a flying one, flying around my house yesterday.


“Ants: The Invisible Majority” including Dr. Brian Fisher, chairman of the Department of Entomology at the Cal Academy of Sciences looking for ants in San Francisco. He created AntWeb, an online resource. The video discusses the Argentine Ant super colonies.

Related: Ants Counting Their StepsE.O. Wilson: Lord of the AntsSymbiotic relationship between ants and bacteria

August 15, 2010

Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?

Are you ready for a world without antibiotics?

[Professor Tim Walsh] “This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing enterobacteriaceae. We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.”

And this is the optimistic view – based on the assumption that drug companies can and will get moving on discovering new antibiotics to throw at the bacterial enemy. Since the 1990s, when pharma found itself twisting and turning down blind alleys, it has not shown a great deal of enthusiasm for difficult antibiotic research. And besides, because, unlike with heart medicines, people take the drugs for a week rather than life, and because resistance means the drugs become useless after a while, there is just not much money in it.

“The emergence of antibiotic resistance is the most eloquent example of Darwin’s principle of evolution that there ever was,” says Livermore. “It is a war of attrition. It is naive to think we can win.”

I have been writing about the huge risks we are talking with our future for years. The careless misuse of antibiotics is very costly (in human lives, in the future). Bacteria pose great risks to us. We need to take antibiotics to fight serious threats. The misuse of antibiotics by doctors, patients, agri-business… is the problem. And we are all living a much riskier future because far to little is being done to reduce the misuse of antibiotics.

More and more antibiotic treatments are losing effectiveness as bacteria evolve resistance. The evolution is accelerated by misuse. This costs lives today, but is likely to costs many thousands and hundreds of thousands and possible more in the next 50 years.

The NDM-1-producing bacteria were highly resistant to all antibiotics except tigecycline and colistin. In some cases, isolates were resistant to all antibiotics. The emergence of NDM-1 positive bacteria is potentially a serious global public health problem as there are few new anti-Gram-negative antibiotics in development and none that are effective against NDM-1.

Related: Antibiotics Breed Superbugs Faster Than ExpectedAntibiotics Too Often Prescribed for Sinus WoesBacteria Race Ahead of DrugsFDA May Make Decision That Will Speed Antibiotic Drug ResistanceRaised Without AntibioticsWaste Treatment Plants Result in Super BacteriaHow Bleach Kills BacteriaCDC Urges Increased Effort to Reduce Drug-Resistant Infections

August 11, 2010

Nearly 45% of the electricity in Portugal Comes From Renewable Sources

Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover

Five years ago, the leaders of this sun-scorched, wind-swept nation made a bet: To reduce Portugal’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, they embarked on an array of ambitious renewable energy projects — primarily harnessing the country’s wind and hydropower, but also its sunlight and ocean waves.

Nearly 45 percent of the electricity in Portugal’s grid will come from renewable sources this year, up from 17 percent just five years ago.

While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.
August 6, 2010

Housecat Adopts Bobcat Kittens

3 bobcat kittens we rescued by Big Cat rescue.

Introductions like these can be very scary because the mother cat can be overly protective of her own kittens and fatally strike out at the new comers. President, Jamie Veronica, has had a considerable amount of experience in this area though and had taken every precaution to make sure it went as well as it possibly could. Bobbi turned out to be a dream come true for three little orphaned bobcats though. She immediately pulled them in close to nurse and began to bathe them. The little bobcat babies were so startled that they hissed at her!

She ignored their resistance and just kept on loving on them. Once they figured out that this strange smelling “bobcat” mom had the real deal to offer at her breasts, they were in love too.

Related: Friday Cat Fun #12: Cat and PuppiesTreadmill CatsMother Cat with Bunny and Kittens

August 4, 2010
August 1, 2010

Engineering Innovation Summer Camp

Summer engineering program fosters genuine interest for some students

Engineering Innovation, which Johns Hopkins has taken nationwide since 2006, is designed to encourage students to pursue careers in engineering and science. According to the university, 90 percent of students who participate in the summer program continue on that path.

Shiesha McNeil, 16, discovered a new potential career during the four-week course. Shiesha — whose bridge held 49 water bottles — had never worked with electric circuits before the class, and she became enthralled with the science behind electricity.

Shiesha is looking at the University of Pennsylvania and Georgetown University. She wants to be a software or computer engineer. “I’ve never worked with electricity like that before,” she said. “I got to work with circuits! I got to make a robot move!”

Related: Infinity Project: Engineering Education for Today’s ClassroomFun k-12 Science and Engineering LearningHands-on Engineering EducationLego Learning

July 29, 2010

Big Bangless and Endless Universe

A new the theory does away with the big bang and dark energy by having space, time and energy and no beginning and no ending.

Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe

Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has developed an innovative new description of the Universe in which the roles of time space and mass are related in new kind of relativity.

Shu’s idea is that time and space are not independent entities but can be converted back and forth between each other. In his formulation of the geometry of spacetime, the speed of light is simply the conversion factor between the two. Similarly, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant G and the speed of light, neither of which need be constant.

So as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts. This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction. In fact, Shu shows that singularities cannot exist in this cosmos.

It’s easy to dismiss this idea as just another amusing and unrealistic model dreamed up by those whacky comsologists.

That is until you look at the predictions it makes. During a period of expansion, an observer in this universe would see an odd kind of change in the red-shift of bright objects such as Type-I supernovas, as they accelerate away. It turns out, says Shu, that his data exactly matches the observations that astronomers have made on Earth.

That’s not to say Shu’s theory is perfect. Far from it. One of the biggest problems he faces is explaining the existence and structure of the cosmic microwave background, something that many astrophysicists believe to be the the strongest evidence that the Big Bang really did happen. The CMB, they say, is the echo of the Big bang.

How it might arise in Shu’s cosmology isn’t yet clear but I imagine he’s working on it.

Science is useful in letting us understand the world better. But it also is an evolving understanding as we learn more and search for answers to more questions. Many attempts to put forth new ideas and have them gain acceptance are made. Most fail to gain traction. But even many of the ideas that are not accepted are interesting.

Read Cosmological Models with No Big Bang by Wun-Yi Shu (on the wonderful open access arXiv).

Related: Why Wasn’t the Earth Covered in Ice 4 Billion Years Ago, When the Sun was DimmerWhy do we Need Dark Energy to Explain the Observable Universe?The State of Physics

July 28, 2010

Being sociable is good for your health

With a little help from your friends you can live longer

A circle of close friends and strong family ties can boost a person’s health more than exercise, losing weight or quitting cigarettes and alcohol, psychologists say.

Holt-Lunstad’s team reviewed 148 studies that tracked the social interactions and health of 308,849 people over an average of 7.5 years. From these they worked out how death rates varied depending on how sociable a person was.

Being lonely and isolated was as bad for a person’s health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or being an alcoholic. It was as harmful as not exercising and twice as bad for the health as being obese.

Open access paper: Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review.

Related: How to build and maintain essential relationshipsCDC Urges Reduction in Salt Intake to Save Hundreds of Thousands of LivesWhy People Often Get Sicker When They’re Stressed

July 26, 2010

Monarch Migration Research

Monarch Butterfly

Monarch butterflies – renowned for their lengthy annual migration to and from Mexico – complete an even more spectacular journey home than previously thought.

New research from the University of Guelph reveals that some North American monarchs born in the Midwest and Great Lakes fly directly east over the Appalachians and settle along the eastern seaboard. Previously, scientists believed the majority of monarchs migrated north directly from the Gulf Coast.

Unfortunately the press release doesn’t provide a link to the study – maybe it is not open science. Often organization focused on closed science don’t do well providing web links (though even open science organizations fall down on this more than they should).

“It solves the long-standing mystery of why monarchs always show up later on the east coast compared to the interior,” he said. “Importantly, it means that the viability of east coast populations is highly dependent upon productivity on the other side of the mountains.”

Monarchs travel thousands of kilometres each year from wintering sites in central Mexico back to North America’s eastern coast, a journey that requires multiple generations (in the same year) produced at various breeding regions.

Biologists had suspected that monarchs fly back from Mexico west-to-east over the Appalachians, but no evidence existed to support the theory. “Ours is the first proof of longitudinal migration,” Miller said.

For the study, the researchers collected 90 monarch samples from 17 sites between Maine and Virginia in June and July of 2009. They also collected 180 samples of milkweed (the only plant monarch larvae can eat) from 36 sites along the eastern coast between May and July of that year.

They then used hydrogen and carbon isotope measurements to determine when and where the monarchs were born. Isotope values in milkweed vary longitudinally and can be measured in monarch wings, Miller said. The researchers discovered that 88 per cent of the monarchs sampled originated in the Midwest and Great Lakes regions.

“This means that the recolonization of the east coast is by second-generation monarchs that hatched around the Great Lakes and then migrated eastward over the Appalachians,” Miller said. “We must target the Great Lakes region to conserve the east coast monarch populations.”

Full press release

Related: Monarch Butterfly MigrationMonarch TravelsBackyard Scientists Aid ResearchTwo Butterfly Species Evolved Into Third

July 25, 2010

Google Research Awards

Google Faculty Research Awards, support full-time faculty pursuing research. The most recent quarterly funding totals over $4 million in 75 awards across 18 different areas. The areas that received the highest level of funding for this round were systems and infrastructure, human computer interaction, multimedia and security. In this round, 26 percent of the funding was awarded to universities outside the U.S.

Some examples

  • Erik Brynjolfsson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Future of Prediction – How Google Searches Foreshadow Housing Prices and Quantities (Economics and market algortihms): How data from search engines like Google provide a highly accurate but simple way to predict future business activities.
  • John Quinn, Makerere University, Uganda. Mobile Crop Surveillance in the Developing World (Multimedia search and audio/video processing): A computer vision system using camera-enabled mobile devices to monitor the spread of viral disease among staple crops.
  • Ronojoy Adhikari, The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, India (probably this is the person, why doesn’t google include a link to these people’s sites?). Machine Learning of Syntax in Undeciphered Scripts (Machine learning): Devise algorithms that would learn to search for evidence of semantics in datasets such as the Indus script.
  • Jennifer Rexford, Princeton. Rethinking Wide-Area Traffic Management (Software and hardware systems infrastructure): Drawing on mature techniques from optimization theory, design new traffic-management solutions where the hosts, routers, and management system cooperate in a more effective way.

Smart companies realize great research is done in universities that should be adlopted by companies. Many companies listen to fools that talk of academic research as not “real world.” Companies like Google do well for many reasons but one is they pay more attention to scientific research than wall street research. More companies would benefit from adopting this leadership style from Google. Google also continues to fund and support research.

Related: posts on science and engineering fundingEnergy Secretary Steve Chu Speaks On Funding Science Research (with Google CEO)Google.org Invests $10 million in Geothermal EnergyLarry Page and Sergey Brin Interview

July 23, 2010

Friday Fun: Robocup 2010, Robot Football

Robocup 2010 took place in Singapore and 2 German team faced each other in the finals. Robocup is an international research and education initiative. RoboCupRescue is a related effort to develop rescue robots for hostile environments.

Related: RoboCup 2008: Robot Football (Soccer)Robot Playing Table TennisToyota Develops Thought-controlled Wheelchair

July 19, 2010

Letting Children Learn – Hole in the Wall Computers

The hole in the wall experiments are exactly the kind of thing I love to lean about. I wrote about them in 2006, what kids can learn.

Research finding from the Hole in the Wall foundation:

Over the 4 year research phase (2000-2004), HiWEL has extensively studied the impact of Learning Stations on children. Hole-in-the-Wall Learning Stations were installed in diverse settings, the impact of interventions was monitored and data was continually gathered, analyzed and interpreted. Rigorous assessments were conducted to measure academic achievement, behaviour, personality profile, computer literacy and correlations with socio-economic indicators.

The sociometric survey found:

  • Self-organizing groups of children who organize themselves into Leaders (experts), Connectors and Novice groups.
  • Leaders and Connectors identified seem to display an ability to connect with and teach other users.
  • Key leaders on receiving targeted intervention, play a key role in bringing about a “multiplier effect in learning” within the community.
  • Often girls are seen to take on the role of Connector, who initiates younger children and siblings (usually novices with little or no exposure to computers) and connects them to the leaders in the group

I believe traditional education is helpful. I believe people are “wired” to learn. They want to learn. We need to create environments that let them learn. We need to avoid crushing the desire to learn (stop de-motivating people).

If you want to get right to talking about the hole in the wall experiments, skip to the 8 minute mark.

Related: Providing Computer to Remote Students in NepalTeaching Through TinkeringKids Need Adventurous PlayScience Toys You Can Make With Your Kids

July 16, 2010

The Billion-Bug Highway In the Sky

Listen to Bug Highway In The Sky

there are 3 billion insects passing over your head in a summer month, he was talking about his survey in Great Britain. Closer to the equator, he says, the numbers should rise. He wouldn’t be surprised, for example, that in the sky over Houston or New Orleans there could be 6 billion critters passing overhead in a month.

Related: Monarch Butterfly MigrationGuadalupe Mountains National Park: Ladybug CityLeaf-footed Bug


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