In the U.S. a powerful open-access advocate has been Harold Varmus, a Nobel laureate, former UC scholar and former NIH director. He’s now head of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. He co-founded Public Library of Science with Berkeley’s Dr. Eisen, backed by a $9 million grant from a private foundation. Charging authors a fee of $1,500, the group launched its first peer-reviewed journal, PLoS Biology, in 2003, and also distributes its contents free on the Internet.

Metin Sitti, director of the NanoRobotics Lab, is developing a set of legs that could be incorporated into the swallowable camera-in-a-pill that has become available in the past four years for diagnosing gastrointestinal disorders in the small intestine.
…
The work is supported by the Intelligent Microsystems Center in Seoul, Korea, and sponsored by the Korean Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Energy.
…
Another CMU roboticist, Cameron Riviere, is developing his own robotic inchworm that would use suction pads to adhere to the exterior of a beating heart. The two-footed device, called HeartLander, might be used to inject cells or drugs, implant electrodes or perform coronary artery bypass procedures.

Silicon Valley is doing a lot of hand-wringing these days about a coming engineer shortage. Tech leaders such as Cisco Systems Inc.’s John Chambers and Stanford University President John Hennessey warn that the U.S. will lose its edge without homegrown talent. The U.S. now ranks 17th world-wide in the number of undergraduate engineers and natural scientists it produces, they point out; that’s down from 1975, when the U.S. was No. 3 (after Japan and Finland).

But some of the nation’s tech elite — including many immigrants who benefited greatly from engineering careers — are finding even their own children shun engineering. One oft-cited reason: concern that dad and his contemporaries will ship such jobs overseas.

The Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS) aims to develop a storehouse of mechanical components hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.
…
“Right now, we make most nanodevices one at a time, sometimes as laboriously as atom by atom,” Zettl says. “That approach can prove a concept, but if you can’t scale up then it becomes a curiosity instead of a viable technology. We need automated assembly at the nanoscale.”

Writing this month in The Wall Street Journal, Norman Augustine, a former CEO of Lockheed Martin Corp., and Burton Richter, a Nobel laureate in physics, said:

“As a percentage of GDP, federal investment in physical science research is half of what it was in 1970. (By contrast), in China, R&D expenditures rose 350 percent between 1991 and 2001, and the number of science and engineering Ph.D.s soared 535 percent.”

Tom Swean was the gruff 58-year-old head of the Navy’s Ocean Engineering and Marine Systems program. He developed million-dollar autonomous underwater robots for the SEALs at the Office of Naval Research. He was not used to dealing with Mexican-American teenagers sporting gold chains, fake diamond rings, and patchy, adolescent mustaches.

The Carl Hayden team stood nervously in front of him. He stared sullenly at them. This was the engineering review - professionals in underwater engineering evaluated all the ROVs, scored each team’s technical documentation, and grilled students about their designs. The results counted for more than half of the total possible points in the contest.

“How’d you make the laser range finder work?” Swean growled. MIT had admitted earlier that a laser would have been the most accurate way to measure distance underwater, but they’d concluded that it would have been difficult to implement.

“We used a helium neon laser, captured its phase shift with a photo sensor, and manually corrected by 30 percent to account for the index of refraction,” Cristian answered rapidly, keyed up on adrenaline. Cameron had peppered them with questions on the drive to Santa Barbara, and Cristian was ready.

Swean raised a bushy, graying eyebrow. He asked about motor speed, and Lorenzo sketched out their combination of controllers and spike relays. Oscar answered the question about signal interference in the tether by describing how they’d experimented with a 15-meter cable before jumping up to one that was 33 meters.

“You’re very comfortable with the metric system,” Swean observed.

“I grew up in Mexico, sir,” Oscar said.

Swean nodded. He eyed their rudimentary flip chart.

“Why don’t you have a PowerPoint display?” he asked.

“PowerPoint is a distraction,” Cristian replied. “People use it when they don’t know what to say.”

“And you know what to say?”

“Yes, sir.”

Held annually in May, the Intel ISEF brings together over 1,300 students from approximately 40 nations to compete for scholarships, tuition grants, internships, scientific field trips and the grand prize: a $50,000 college scholarship.

In 1998, Intel Corporation assumed sponsorship of the program previously sponsored by the Westinghouse Foundation as a way to recognize and reward excellence in science and to encourage more young people to explore science and technology.

Since assuming the sponsorship, Intel has increased awards and scholarships from $207,000 to $1,250,000 a year”

These courses are organized around a set of concepts, skills and attitudes necessary for an engineering career. Unfortunately, students in many other schools can still graduate having had no practical contact with engineering concepts or case studies. A major problem of secondary education is that schools teach science, technology, and mathematics only in the context of the specific disciplines. These courses solve that problem. It shows students the important engineering concepts and has them work on real-world case studies resembling the problems they will be solving in an engineering career.

Bacteria have been programmed to behave like computers, assembling themselves into complex shapes based on instructions stuffed into their genes.

The research could lead to smart biological devices that could detect hazardous substances or bioterrorism chemicals, scientists say. Eventually, the process might be used to direct the construction of useful devices or the growth of new tissue, perhaps restoring function to a severed spinal cord.

Bacteria acquired up to 90 percent of their genetic material from distantly related bacteria species, according to new research from The University of Arizona in Tucson.

The finding has important biomedical implications because such gene-swapping, or lateral gene transfer, is the way many pathogenic bacteria pick up antibiotic resistance or become more virulent.

…

Most commonly, genes are transmitted by bacteriophages, viruses that specifically hijack bacteria cells. Like tiny syringes, phages inject their own genetic material into the host cell, forcing it to produce new phages. During such an event, genes from the bacterial genome can be incorporated into the newly made phages. They inject their newly modified genetic load into other bacteria. This way, bacteriophages act as shuttles, taking up DNA from one bacterium and dumping it into another. Bacteria can also make contact by tiny connection tubes through which they exchange pieces of DNA. They can also take up genetic material from the environment.